Gift of Screws, Chapter 20.1
Title: Gift of Screws, Chapter Twenty, Part 1
Author: Duckie Nicks
Rating: NC-17 for sex
Characters: House, Cuddy, Rachel Cuddy
Author's Note: This piece takes place in the future when Rachel is five; House and Cuddy are in an established relationship.
Warning: This fic also contains sex. If that bothers you, don't read.
Summary: For a price, House agrees to celebrate Purim with Cuddy and Rachel. But although he's getting all the sex he
wants, he's still not sure he'll be able to last the weekend. Established relationship, contains sexual situations.
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 (Part 1), Chapter 9 (Part 2), Chapter 9 (Part 3), Chapter 9 (Part 4), Chapter 10 (Part 1), Chapter 10 (Part 2), Chapter 10 (Part 3), Chapter 11, Chapter 12 (Part 1), Chapter 12 (Part 2), Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18 (Part 1), Chapter 18 (Part 2), Chapter 19 (Part 1), Chapter 19 (Part 2), Chapter 19 (Part 3), Chapter 19 (Part 4)
Disclaimer: I don't own it.
"Essential oils are wrung:
The attar from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws." - Emily Dickinson
The feel of someone’s hand pushing into her crotch woke her up abruptly. A groan escaping her throat, she was too tired to even open her eyes. But she thought she didn’t need to to discourage House. “House,” she half moaned, half whined. The hand was followed by a knee. “Oh, for the love of God, leave me alone.”
A tiny laugh was what she got for a response. It was high pitched, not at all like a man’s laugh.
That was when she noticed, in between the giggles, the familiar sound of House snoring. So he couldn’t possibly be the one laughing or on top of her.
Confused Cuddy opened her eyes to see Rachel crawling up the bed. “Rachel,” she said sleepily. Reaching down, Cuddy pulled her up the rest of the bed. “Come snuggle with Mommy.”
Rachel let her pull her into a hug, but she was clearly not interested in lying in bed the way Cuddy was right now. “Can we play a game?”
Cuddy kissed her daughter’s shoulder. “In a minute,” she slurred. She didn’t mean to be this tired or out of it. Normally when Rachel woke her up, she could get up right away and stay awake. But thanks to whatever House had put in her tea, the need to sleep overrode her general nature. “Just… close your eyes and sleep with your mama for a while.”
Those words might have worked when Rachel was two or three, when she could be easily convinced that lying in bed with her mother was different than being all alone in her crib. For the most part though, that had changed; Rachel wasn’t fooled as often as Cuddy would have liked, wouldn’t go back to sleep, no matter what Cuddy said. But there were times when it did still work. Sometimes Rachel really did just want to be held close. Whether that was what she wanted today, Cuddy never knew.
She was asleep before she’d even had a chance to notice Rachel’s reaction.
When she woke up again, it was to the sound of a loud bang. She had no idea how much time had passed, but as she shot out of bed, she knew that noises were not a good sign. It had meant she’d been asleep long enough for something to go wrong.
Sitting up, she looked over to House. He was prostrate on the mattress. One arm tucked against his stomach, the other was draped over her pillow. He’d kicked the covers down, so that they only covered up to one of his knees on one leg and an ankle on the other. Sounds were coming from the bathroom, but clearly it wasn’t bothering him.
Which meant that, as always, she was the one who had to figure out was going on.
Begrudgingly she kicked the covers off of her body. Her bare legs were not prepared for the cool air, and she shivered the second she no longer had the sheets to ward off the chill. But hearing the sound of something crashing in the bathroom, she didn’t bother to put on pants. She simply headed straight to the bathroom and pushed the almost closed door open.
She was anything but prepared for the mess she saw. A half-crushed box of tampons lie in the middle of the floor, a couple tampons strewn about near the toilet and on the bath mat. Her birth control was in said toilet. Toilet paper had been unraveled, and both the tube of toothpaste and bottle of lubricant were spilled on the tile. And standing in the middle of the mess was a disheveled Rachel.
“What did you do?” Cuddy demanded, angrier than she intended. Her head pounded as she hurled the words out. She didn’t mean to sound so furious, but she felt hung over and grouchy, and like a dial stuck to one channel, she found herself unable to be patient.
“I -”
“Why did you make this mess?” She clutched her head with one of her hands as her headache seemed to get worse.
“I said I wanted to play,” Rachel reminded her.
Cuddy forced herself to inhale and exhale a few times to prevent herself from losing her temper. As awful as this was, she knew she was reacting to the drugs, to the way her body was responding to whatever the hell was in her body. It wasn’t about Rachel, and she couldn’t let it be.
“You have toys,” Cuddy said in a tone that she tried very hard to make it seem calm.
“I got bored.”
“Well… that’s not an excuse. You can’t just….” Her voice trailed off as she noticed the brown pill bottle carelessly laying on the sink. The top had popped off, and several of the pills had spilled out, which made it possible for her to see what drug it was. Her haze made it difficult to get to the conclusion that seemed right on the tip of her tongue. “A bathroom’s not….” And then she realized:
It was Vicodin.
Immediately she felt wide awake. All of her senses were heightened, and her heart began to race with the possibility that Rachel had been playing with House’s Vicodin. Instantly, Cuddy grabbed the bottle.
“Were you playing with this?” she demanded to know. So much for not losing her temper, she thought. “Were you?”
Rachel was taken aback by the question. “No,” she said hesitantly.
“Rachel.”
“I didn’t!”
Cuddy didn’t believe her. “Did you take any of them?”
“No -”
“Honey, this is very important,” she said sternly. “If you took one, you need to let me know. Even if you didn’t think it was bad for you, I need you to tell me if you swallowed one of these.”
The seriousness in her voice scared Rachel. Cuddy could see it happening. The more she tried to stress how important this all was, the more her daughter was beginning to think that she had done something wrong. And technically pill or no pill, she had done something wrong, very wrong, in making the bathroom look like this. But all this insistence about the Vicodin took away from that and clearly made Rachel confused and fearful.
“No,” she answered after a second. “Don’t like medicine. It’s yucky.”
“Are you sure?” Cuddy didn’t mean to badger, but this was as serious a matter as it got. If Rachel had taken a pill because she’d thought it was candy or because she was bored, she needed to say that now. Obviously she was denying it, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, did it?
Of course, by being insistent, Cuddy had guaranteed that her daughter would be too afraid to tell the truth if she had taken some of the Vicodin. She would see her mother, who was being, admittedly, unintentionally hysterical, and she would be too fearful to say what she had done. She would assume that she would be in trouble, and wanting to avoid that, she would lie… even if lying was dangerous in this instance.
“Uh huh. Didn’t play with them,” she said with a nod of the head.
“You’re sure about this?”
“I taked none!” Rachel screamed, apparently having had enough of this line of questioning.
Cuddy’s eyes narrowed on her as she made that outburst. “Don’t talk to me like that, Rachel,” she said firmly. “I’m -”
“No! I don’t like pills! And -”
“The next person who screams,” a tired voice interrupted. “Is going to be getting a buttload of pills to shut them up if they don’t stop yelling.”
House wasn’t kidding either.
Their squabbling had woken him up minutes ago, and though he had tried to ignore their fighting, they had made that impossible. They had made him get out of bed, when he could have been sleeping, to interrupt their argument.
Glancing around the bathroom, he could easily see why everyone was upset; the room had been trashed. And between that unpleasant sight, the party he was going to have to go to in the near future, and their angry voices, he was in no mood to deal with this fight of theirs.
He would, of course, step in, if only to shut them up. But he’d run out of patience before he’d stepped over the threshold to the bathroom. And if they both insisted on yelling, he really wasn’t going to be above jamming a few pills down their gullet as though they were hyper, overreactive, neurotic terriers.
“What is going on?” he asked in that way that said he didn’t really care what was going on; he just wanted everyone to shut up.
Immediately Rachel ran towards him. He thought she was scampering to escape, trying to avoid whatever punishment she knew she would get for, evidently, unwrapping several of Cuddy’s tampons and squeezing toothpaste all over the place. But Rachel didn’t try to duck out the door. She simply moved next to him, as though he were going to protect her from her crazy mother.
He didn’t exactly enjoy the picture that painted in his mind. But his discomfort was only surpassed by Cuddy’s. Seeing her own child seek some reassurance in him seemed to make her angry - and not at Rachel, but at him.
He wasn’t sure if her irritation was because Rachel seemed to like him at all or because Rachel seemed to think that he would back her up in this fight. The latter certainly would have been a more reasonable conclusion, given the circumstances. Yet House knew that Cuddy could be anything but rational when it came to her daughter. And as much as she said she wanted him to have a relationship with Rachel, sometimes Cuddy behaved as though sharing Rachel was the last thing she wanted.
Of course, he could understand that. Cuddy loved her daughter and wanted to be able to do everything for her. With her job, that was obviously not possible, and he supposed that no one could ever really single handedly give their child everything he or she wanted. But Cuddy was… well, Cuddy. She didn’t easily recognize logical limitations or let that stop her from striving for better. Professionally that made her an adept problem solver; professionally it was the reason he had a job at all. Yet that kind of thinking didn’t always translate well to their home. She wanted to be the one to give Rachel everything, to do everything for her. And when that didn’t happen, when Rachel came to him for something, that was obviously upsetting to her.
Knowing that he was not surprised she turned to him in anger. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on,” she told him in a way that sounded like an accusation.
He didn’t deny the charge. “Well, to be fair, I was hoping to understand absolutely none of it on account of being unconscious. But since you both woke me up, I have no choice but to -”
“She got in your Vicodin stash,” she nearly shouted.
Suddenly he could understand why she was upset. The problem was two-fold; like everything else, it couldn’t just be one thing motivating her fear. Sure, there was the terrifying idea that Rachel had ingested some of the medication. But House knew that in the back of Cuddy’s mind, there was an equally problematic concern for her.
She had been the one to let the Vicodin in the house. It was his obviously, but he would have been to content to keep it in his car, in a hollowed out book at work, in his apartment - anywhere else. But she had insisted that it be here. If he were going to take the drug, she wanted it to be as open and blatant as possible so that she could monitor his use. In other words, through no encouragement of his own, she had demanded he bring the drug into their home. And if Rachel had taken any, Cuddy would think how she had been the one to cause that scenario.
She would hate herself for that, and chances were, even if Rachel hadn’t swallowed a single pill, Cuddy would regret her actions. Which meant that he could no longer keep the drug here, he thought. She hadn’t said anything yet, and it might take her a while to actually broach the topic, but she wouldn’t want the Vicodin in her home any longer. Regardless of what she’d initially thought was best for him, she would want it gone in order to protect her daughter.
Truth be told, he was okay with that. After all, it wasn’t like he had wanted the Vicodin here. She had created that scenario. But, thinking that her mind was already teeming with personal guilt, he decided that that was not something he should say. In fact, given the way she was reacting, he felt that right now there was only thing to do:
Diffuse the situation as best he could.
Looking down at Rachel, he picked her up. He wanted to be able to look her in the eyes and at the same time, ensure that she couldn’t run away.
“Put me down,” she whined.
He ignored her. “Did you take one of those -”
“No,” she snarled, her legs kicking about wildly.
He responded by hugging her to his body.
With her secure in his grasp, he knew he was in no danger of being kicked. She would try; he understood she would try, but she wouldn’t be able to hurt him.
Turning his attention back to Cuddy, he said, “She says she didn’t take one.”
That wasn’t enough for her. “And you think she’s going to tell the truth if -”
“I think she is telling the truth.”
Cuddy wasn’t wrong to think that Rachel might lie. Given the way Cuddy was behaving, that actually seemed like a perfectly reasonable response. But House had looked in Rachel’s eyes, and he had seen honesty. She had many visible and audible tells when she lied, and he had noticed absolutely none of them.
Cuddy didn’t seem convinced. “But -”
“Rachel,” he said, not letting Cuddy finish her sentence. “If you took a pill -”
“I didn’t!” she screamed.
“But if you did, we would have take you to the hospital, because you would get really sick. And if you didn’t take one, then you’ll have tons of fun cleaning all of this up,” he explained. “Either way, the next hour or so is gonna suck for you, so there’s no point in lying.”
Rachel looked apoplectic with anger, her cheeks were so red. “Didn’t. lie,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Then you can start cleaning,” he told her cheerfully. Putting her down on the ground once more, he gestured towards the mess she had made. She hesitated to pick anything up, so he gave her a small push toward the spilled tube of toothpaste. “Go on,” he said.
Rachel looked like she was wishing she had taken some Vicodin, a pain he was all too familiar with. But she did start to clean up. As she started balling up the toilet paper strewn about the room, he turned his attention to Cuddy, who seemed equal parts angry and confused.
Reaching for her, he tucked his fingers into the waistband of her panties. His button down covered her on that front, but having dressed her, he knew exactly where to hook his fingers. Tugging her toward him, he said, “You come with me.”
“House.” She was uncomfortable with his hand that close to her vagina when her daughter was in the room with them. Quickly Cuddy shoved his hand away, but she followed him back out into their bedroom anyway. When they were alone once more, she said, “You can’t do that in front of her. You can’t -”
“You need to relax,” he told her gently, pulling her into a hug. His embrace was warm and just what she wanted, but it didn’t make her feel any better.
“I can’t,” she confessed. Her voice turning accusatory, she said, “Whatever you put in that tea…. I can’t - I just want to go back to sleep.”
“Then do it,” he said, like there was nothing else she had to do today, like she could easily just do that without any consequences. “There’s still some time.”
“No, there’s not,” she whined into his chest. Rubbing her face against his soft t-shirt, she said, “I need to wake up, start getting ready.”
He patted her back. “Then go make yourself some tea or use that espresso machine I got you that you never use and wake up. I’ll make sure Rachel cleans the bathroom.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think -”
“Then do whatever you want,” he said dismissively. “But seriously? You’re gonna have to put on pants if you’re going to keep acting like this. You look ridiculous.”
She half scoffed, half laughed. She supposed she did look ridiculous. “Fine,” she agreed. “I’m gonna make coffee.”
As she pulled away from him, he asked, “Make me a cup?”
“Yeah. Sure. You’ll keep an eye on her?” He nodded his head. “All right.”
She started to walk away, but he called after her. “I’m serious about the pants thing,” he told her. “I see legs and thighs, and I -”
“I will put on pants,” she said turning back to him. “If you keep it in yours.”
House shrugged. “Okay.”
Frankly, given how many times he’d fucked her this weekend, not doing her again was a pretty easy request to handle. He hadn’t exactly been kidding when he spoke of the effect her legs were having on him, but sex was the last thing he wanted right now.
“She threw my birth control into the toilet,” Cuddy told him, perhaps thinking he really did want to have sex with her.
“Why would she -”
“I have no idea,” she said with a shrug.
“Well, thank God your mouth can’t -”
“I have another pack under the sink.”
That didn’t comfort him. “Assuming she didn’t build a fort with them.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I’m letting you know so you don’t freak out when you see the pills in the toilet.”
He nodded his head. “Understood. I’ll try not to cut off my own dick at the prospect of getting you pregnant.”
House hadn’t wanted to sex to begin with. But knowing that there was a possibility she didn’t have birth control, he really didn’t care that her legs looked enticing right then. Playing with what existed between those legs could lead to bad things.
He could get her pregnant if he weren’t careful and Rachel had ruined all of the birth control in the home.
For that reason it was easy for him to watch her walk away without feeling the urge to jump her.
Turning away from her, he headed back to the bathroom. Rachel was mopping up toothpaste with some toilet paper, which was just making the mess even bigger.
“Don’t do that,” he told her calmly. She looked up at him, unhappiness putting the frown on her face. “You’re just going to make a mess. A bigger mess.” Pointing to the tampons all along the ground, he said, “You clean those up. I’ll take care of the spill.”
She nodded okay, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Picking up Mommy’s crotch corks was a lot easier than wiping up toothpaste and lube - as he discovered quickly. As he started to clean up the mess with paper towels and some lemon-scented spray Cuddy kept under the sink, he realized that it was actually going to take some effort. The lube was slick, the toothpaste sticky, and it was hard to get the right amount of traction that would allow him to clean both substances off the ground.
“House?” Rachel asked.
“Hmm?”
He didn’t look at her, but she used the applicator to launch a tampon at his face anyway. Then he did look over at her, and she laughed.
“You think that’s funny?”
“Uh huh.” He made a gimme motion. “Here. Give me another one.” She handed him an unwrapped tampon. “That’s nothing,” he told her, easily getting the tampon out of its plastic applicator.
Two tampons in hand, he gingerly pushed them into his nostrils. When they were in far enough to stay there on their own, he screwed his face up to exaggerate the effect.
Seeing him do that made Rachel laugh boisterously. Unfortunately, it was at that moment that Cuddy decided to return with mugs of coffee in her hand. And when she saw him, she was definitely not amused by his antics.
“What are you doing?” she asked as though he were a complete idiot.
He pulled a tampon out by the string and held it out for her to take. “Nothing, dear. Just getting one of these out for your convenience… since clearly you could use one right about now.”
She still wasn’t laughing, and he smirked at her in defiance.
“Rachel,” Cuddy said calmly. “You’re done here. Go play.”
The bathroom was barely cleaned, but Rachel was smart enough to know better than to fight. If her mother said she could leave, of course she was going to do just that. And no one was surprised when she took off as quickly as her chubby legs could go.
As soon as she was gone, Cuddy kicked the door shut behind her. “You know I can’t use those now, right?”
He pulled the other tampon out and threw both in the trash. “Oh well.”
“You shouldn’t encourage her to do those kinds of things. Now she’s going to want to play in here -”
“No, she’s not,” he interrupted. “No kid is going to want to play in the bathroom when -”
“If that were true, this mess wouldn’t exist,” she pointed out, handing him his mug of coffee.
He took a sip. It was sweeter than he liked, but he didn’t complain. It was strong, which was really what he needed. The jolt of caffeine made it possible for him to consider her words… and deny that they were true. “You think she’s going to come in here to play after your reaction?”
Cuddy gazed down at her feet, her fingers nervously toying with the handle of her own mug.
“Yeah,” she agreed quietly. “You might be right about that.”
“I am right about that,” he asserted.
“Of course. Cause you’re always right when it comes to Rachel.”
The comment hit a little too closely to home for him to truly react to it with any sort of humor. No, he thought darkly, he was rarely right when it came to dealing with Rachel. Hadn’t his own behavior this weekend proved as much?
But he refused to let that doubt show. Though he didn’t see any humor in the situation, he forced himself to handle the moment casually.
He stuck his tongue out at her. “Now see, here I was, going to offer to reach into the toilet and grab your birth control myself.”
“And now?”
“Well now you can do this all by yourself, the great pant-less wonder,” he said, gesturing to her still bare legs.
She smiled. “House, if you don’t help me, my birth control isn’t going to be the only thing in the toilet bowl.”
“I don’t understand. You’re gonna make me stand in the -”
“I’m going to drown you if you get up and leave me,” she threatened.
This time he was the one who smiled. “Okay,” he said setting his mug to the side. Leaning back against the tub, he held his arms open as though he welcomed the challenge. “Let’s see you do that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re threatening to drown me. I’d like to see how you plan on getting me anywhere near the toilet.”
She glared at him. “You are infuriating. And I probably have more physical strength than -”
“Yes, I imagine with breasts and an ass that big, it must take considerable effort to remain upright,” he said with a nod of the head.
“You’re an idiot.” She was smiling anyway.
“But I’m not wrong.”
Gingerly she placed her mug on the countertop.
“Oh,” he said patronizingly. “So it’s not enough for you to just be wrong. You need to actually prove that you’re not right about this.” Without a word she moved towards him. “That’s fine,” he continued. When she stood in front of him, he told her, “I like being this close to your vagina. That’s cool.”
She grabbed hold of his t-shirt to try to move him, but of course that wasn’t going to work. Her hands moved to his head, and though he said, “Ow,” when she tugged a little too hard, she still failed.
In fact, as he roped an arm around her thighs and pulled her near him, all she managed to do was get closer to her. “I don’t think this is working,” he told her when she was pressed against him.
She stopped pulling at him then. Her body nearly going limp, she abruptly shifted gears. Leaning down she kissed him on top of his head. “Fine,” she capitulated. “But if there’s ever a fire, you should know I’m not dragging your ass out.”
“I would challenge you on that, but I’m not going to set a fire and sit in it to prove you’re wrong,” he said, running his chin along one of her knees.
“Well that would be a first.”
He shrugged. “Don’t you worry.” He patted her ass gently. “I’ll remember this conversation in case there ever is a fire, and we’ll see who’s right then.”
“And if I let you die?”
“Then I’d expect a little haunting to be done.”
“You’d turn into a ghost?”
“Oh yeah. I hope your ass is prepared for some paranormal activity.” He paused for a moment before specifying, “And I do mean your ass specifically, not -”
“Are you really talking about having sex with me as a ghost?”
Well, when she put it like that, it did seem rather ridiculous. “Sorry,” he said immediately. “Cleaning supplies must have -”
“I’m sure.”
“So you see, I really can’t help you keep cleaning….”
“Fine,” she said pulling away from him. “I’ll do it all by myself.”
He knew what she was doing, giving him the option of walking away so that he would stay. It was a cheap way to make him feel guilty, an easy way, and he understood that. He could see it for what it was. But she had had such a difficult weekend as it was that he could not get up and walk away from this mess. Under normal circumstances, sure, he could do that. Today though it would seem cruel to leave her alone to clean up the entire bathroom. Today when she needed him, to deny her even the slightest bit of help would be wrong.
“Never mind,” he grumbled.
She had to turn away from him then so that he wouldn’t see the triumphant smile on her face. He liked to think that he was the one who controlled their relationship, and certainly he’d exploited her physical weakness during that last round to show that he could do what he wanted and she couldn’t make him do anything different. But in the end, she had won the round. She might not have been able to physically move him, but Cuddy had plenty of other tricks up her sleeves to get what she wanted.
“Oh shut up,” he snapped, somehow sensing what she was thinking. “Just because you got what you wanted doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know,” she agreed. “It just means I got what I wanted.”
He scowled but dropped the matter altogether. For that she was honestly grateful. She loved him dearly, and they were having a playful discussion, but one wrong remark about who was in charge, and they would be fighting. And the last thing she wanted was to argue with him.
Unfortunately that seemed almost inevitable when, five minutes later, he asked, “Why isn’t Rachel doing this again?”
“I don’t want her to get dirty before the party.”
“Well, I’ve got the messy part,” he pointed out. “It’s not….” His voice trailed off in that way it did when he was coming to some sort of conclusion. “You let her go, because you felt guilty for yelling at her,” he said knowingly.
“No. I just told you what my reason -”
“I know what you said. I also know that that reason doesn’t make any sense.”
She sighed loudly, reaching into the toilet to grab her birth control pills. Immediately she tossed them into the trash. As they hit the bottom of the can with a thunk, she asked him, “Does it really matter? If I let her go because I feel bad, does it really bother you that much?”
“So you’re admitting it,” he said, ignoring her question.
“I’m just asking -”
“It would matter to me, sure,” he admitted as though that were a given. “You shouldn’t let her get away with things, because you feel guilty. Or else, ten years from now, she’s going to be like that brat on The Real Housewives of Jersey, and I’m going to have to be the one to buy her another car.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ashley or is it Ashlee these days?” he wondered out loud. She could only assume he was wondering, anyway; he certainly shouldn’t have been looking to her for an answer.
When he watched that crap, it was generally when he couldn’t sleep and she was unconscious next to him. She had no clue what he was talking about, as her only glimpses of the show had been when she’d woken up and demanded he go elsewhere to watch it.
In the end, he didn’t wait around for her to give him an answer one way or the other. He simply continued talking. “Whatever. I’m just saying, if she doesn’t have to clean up this mess, she’ll do it again.”
She turned to give him a pointed look. “But according to your logic, I’ve already freaked out and scared her, and she won’t play in the bathroom again. That’s what you said.”
He frowned. “I don’t like it when you’re smarter than me.”
“I do.”
She was happy that he let the comment go without a rebuttal or pointing out that he was typically the smarter of the two. Instead, he simply said, “Well, at least Rachel will be in a good mood since she didn’t have to clean up.”
Cuddy was doubtful of that though. And fast-forward a couple hours later, she understood that she had had good reason to doubt that.
Rachel had already expressed her feelings over this party. She didn’t want to go, and despite knowing there were no other options, she still felt as though complaining were the appropriate way to handle this. Frankly, Cuddy could deal with the whining. She didn’t like it, but it was tolerable for the most part, because she could easily ignore it.
But when she tried to get Rachel dressed, it was no longer possibly to pretend that this wasn’t happening. “Come on,” Cuddy said, practically dragging Rachel into her bedroom. “We need to get you dressed.”
“Why? You’re not dressed. I wanna play.”
“I’m waiting for House to get out of the bathroom, and then I’ll get showered and get dressed,” she explained.
Rachel slowly moved further into the room. “Then why do I -”
“Because Mommy wants you ready to go.” Cuddy pulled open her daughter’s closet doors. “Now get undressed.”
Rachel stomped her foot. “I don’t wanna go.”
“I know, but that’s not an option.”
Understanding that that was the case, Cuddy went straight for the dress she knew would improve Rachel’s mood. On the whole, Rachel was neither prone to being girly or tomboyish. She neither loved nor hated clothes for the most part. But she really did love one of the dresses she owned.
It was purple but a shade so dark that it almost looked navy. It was made of silk ruffles from top to bottom, and she loved how soft it was against her skin. More than anything though, she liked being able to twirl around to make the ruffles dance. It was sleeveless and would require a sweater to be worn with it. And the prospect of having to shove Rachel into tights was not exactly one Cuddy was looking forward to. But it would be worth it if Rachel had something to be happy about, something to distract her from all of the things she wanted to complain about.
“Look,” Cuddy said, trying to pull Rachel’s attention away from pouting. “You can wear your dress.”
Rachel’s eyes immediately lit up. “Really?”
“Uh huh.” Cuddy laid the dress flat on Rachel’s bed. “But we need to get you undressed. And you’ve got to promise me you’ll try not to spill anything on it.”
“I promise,” Rachel said instantly and without hesitation.
“All right. Let’s skin the cat.”
Rachel held her arms straight up in the air, so Cuddy could peel off the sweatshirt the little girl was wearing.
“Can you take off your pants and your socks by yourself?”
Rachel nodded her head. Cuddy turned away from her so she could discretely pull out a pair of tights and a cardigan. Too busy taking off her pants, Rachel didn’t notice.
“Why do you say skin the cat?” she asked, kicking her pants off at the ankles.
“I don’t know,” Cuddy answered after a moment’s consideration. “I guess… my father said it to me a few times when I was little. I guess it stuck with me.”
Rachel reached down to tug off her socks. “I don’t think it’s nice to skin cats.”
“No,” Cuddy agreed. “It’s not.”
“Can I have a cat?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You have allergies,” she said, turning around with the tights in her hand.
As soon as she did, Rachel saw them. The joy she’d felt instantly died. Her face fell as she understood that her mother wanted to put her in tights.
“No,” she whined. “I don’t want tights!”
“You’re gonna get cold without them, baby,” Cuddy tried to explain.
But that didn’t make any difference. Rachel didn’t want to them, and there was nothing Cuddy could say that would change that. That meant there was no point in trying to rationalize why tights were needed. There was no use in trying to make Rachel understand, because she would always say that she didn’t want to wear them.
“Come on,” Cuddy said, gesturing with her free hand to the bed. “Sit down, so Mommy can put them -”
“No!”
Cuddy wasn’t dismayed. “This isn’t optional. You have to wear them. That’s all there is to it. Now sit down.”
The increased firmness in her voice didn’t have any effect on Rachel. Or rather they had an effect; it was just the opposite of what Cuddy wanted. Because as soon as she had made it clear that there were going to be tights involved and there was no way around it, Rachel took off - sprinting nearly naked through the rest of the house.
At first Cuddy didn’t want to dignify Rachel with the response of chasing after her. She simply called out, “Get back here, Rachel. Right now.” When that didn’t work, she knew she had no choice but to follow after her.
By then though, Rachel had had enough time to run and hide. She wasn’t sure why Mommy hadn’t followed after her right away. Normally she was good at catching her and taking her back. But this time, Rachel had managed to run away.
She was happy about that… until she realized she needed to hide. Mommy wouldn’t stay where she was for forever. She would realize what had happened and come after her. And she would be mad, so she would be mad at Rachel when she found her, and Rachel didn’t want that to happen. Cause when Mommy was mad, that meant it was time out time.
But she wasn’t sure where she should hide. Mommy was in her room, so that meant she couldn’t hide in there, because Mommy would see her, and it would be easy to catch her. She couldn’t run outside, because that wasn’t allowed, and even if it was, she was pretty much naked, so she would get cold. She didn’t like being cold.
Mommy always checked under the dining room table, so Rachel thought that that wasn’t a very good option.
“Rachel.” She didn’t dare turn around at hearing her mother’s voice. She didn’t want to see Mommy looking for her or worse, looking at her, so she made an immediate choice to sprint for the nearest hiding spot she could find.
In this case, it was House’s office. Actually, that sounded like a good idea, because she wasn’t allowed in House’s office, and Mommy wouldn’t look in here anyway.
But the second Rachel slipped into the room and closed the door behind her, she thought it wasn’t a very good choice at all.
House was in there. He was playing a videogame on the television he kept in here, but he clearly saw her. Because the moment she realized he was in here, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Um… nothing,” she lied, not knowing what she should say.
“Do you need something?”
“No,” she said tiptoeing in the room further.
He looked over at her. Even from this distance, in his estimation, she looked guilty. She stood there, naked except for a pair of underwear. But written all over her features was fear that he only ever saw when she was worried she was going to be caught for doing something.
Instantly he understood that she was hiding from Cuddy. Whatever she’d done, she had earned her mother’s disapproval, and she was avoiding being punished, he figured.
Part of House knew that at that moment, he should have been calling out for Cuddy. She would have obviously been looking for her daughter by then. If Rachel were trying to hide and the quiet manner in which she’d shut the door suggested that she was, then clearly that was because Cuddy was looking for her. And he guessed, although he hadn’t read it recently, that it was in the boyfriend handbook that he should have let Cuddy know her daughter was here.
But that wasn’t what he did.
Obviously Cuddy would find her kid eventually. It wasn’t like Rachel had run away, and his knowledge would help bring her back alive. They were in the safety of their own home, and Cuddy would inevitably discover that Rachel was in here - either because she thought Rachel might hide in here or because she would come ask for his help.
In other words, the matter would resolve itself.
… And really, House didn’t feel like getting involved. Maybe he would have under other circumstances, but the ice world was the hardest to get through in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and he’d died so many times already that he was on his last penguin suit as it was. He guessed he could have paused, but given his luck, when he finally got to play again, he’d forget where he was, and a floating penguin would kill him. And if he could avoid the indignity of another continue, he was going to do that.
Still he reached over and patted the bit of couch next to him. “Sit down.”
She did though she seemed wary of the offer.
“Take the blanket,” he said gesturing with his head to the throw that was on the back of the loveseat. “Cover yourself up. You’ll be cold otherwise.”
It also would make hanging out with her a little less awkward for him. Somehow her being naked just made the whole thing seem creepy when he knew that it wasn’t.
When she’d draped the throw over her shoulders, she asked, “Can I play?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I already started my game. And you need to get ready to go to the party.”
“You need to get ready to go to the party,” she said like a brat.
He gestured towards the freshly pressed pants and shirt he was wearing. His jacket had been carelessly tossed onto his desk chair, but it was nearby. “I am ready.”
“Oh.”
“Go find your Mommy and have her get you ready.”
“No!” It was clear she definitely didn’t want to do that. “I wanna play the game.”
“Too bad.”
When she tried to grab at the controller, he was quick and moved out of the way. But the damage was already done. The jump his Mario had been trying to make fell short. And his penguined plumber fell into the gap. House tried to get Mario to hit one of the cliff walls so that he could jump back up and stay alive.
But that didn’t work.
And Mario died.
Continue on to the rest of the chapter
Author: Duckie Nicks
Rating: NC-17 for sex
Characters: House, Cuddy, Rachel Cuddy
Author's Note: This piece takes place in the future when Rachel is five; House and Cuddy are in an established relationship.
Warning: This fic also contains sex. If that bothers you, don't read.
Summary: For a price, House agrees to celebrate Purim with Cuddy and Rachel. But although he's getting all the sex he
wants, he's still not sure he'll be able to last the weekend. Established relationship, contains sexual situations.
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 (Part 1), Chapter 9 (Part 2), Chapter 9 (Part 3), Chapter 9 (Part 4), Chapter 10 (Part 1), Chapter 10 (Part 2), Chapter 10 (Part 3), Chapter 11, Chapter 12 (Part 1), Chapter 12 (Part 2), Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18 (Part 1), Chapter 18 (Part 2), Chapter 19 (Part 1), Chapter 19 (Part 2), Chapter 19 (Part 3), Chapter 19 (Part 4)
Disclaimer: I don't own it.
"Essential oils are wrung:
The attar from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws." - Emily Dickinson
The feel of someone’s hand pushing into her crotch woke her up abruptly. A groan escaping her throat, she was too tired to even open her eyes. But she thought she didn’t need to to discourage House. “House,” she half moaned, half whined. The hand was followed by a knee. “Oh, for the love of God, leave me alone.”
A tiny laugh was what she got for a response. It was high pitched, not at all like a man’s laugh.
That was when she noticed, in between the giggles, the familiar sound of House snoring. So he couldn’t possibly be the one laughing or on top of her.
Confused Cuddy opened her eyes to see Rachel crawling up the bed. “Rachel,” she said sleepily. Reaching down, Cuddy pulled her up the rest of the bed. “Come snuggle with Mommy.”
Rachel let her pull her into a hug, but she was clearly not interested in lying in bed the way Cuddy was right now. “Can we play a game?”
Cuddy kissed her daughter’s shoulder. “In a minute,” she slurred. She didn’t mean to be this tired or out of it. Normally when Rachel woke her up, she could get up right away and stay awake. But thanks to whatever House had put in her tea, the need to sleep overrode her general nature. “Just… close your eyes and sleep with your mama for a while.”
Those words might have worked when Rachel was two or three, when she could be easily convinced that lying in bed with her mother was different than being all alone in her crib. For the most part though, that had changed; Rachel wasn’t fooled as often as Cuddy would have liked, wouldn’t go back to sleep, no matter what Cuddy said. But there were times when it did still work. Sometimes Rachel really did just want to be held close. Whether that was what she wanted today, Cuddy never knew.
She was asleep before she’d even had a chance to notice Rachel’s reaction.
When she woke up again, it was to the sound of a loud bang. She had no idea how much time had passed, but as she shot out of bed, she knew that noises were not a good sign. It had meant she’d been asleep long enough for something to go wrong.
Sitting up, she looked over to House. He was prostrate on the mattress. One arm tucked against his stomach, the other was draped over her pillow. He’d kicked the covers down, so that they only covered up to one of his knees on one leg and an ankle on the other. Sounds were coming from the bathroom, but clearly it wasn’t bothering him.
Which meant that, as always, she was the one who had to figure out was going on.
Begrudgingly she kicked the covers off of her body. Her bare legs were not prepared for the cool air, and she shivered the second she no longer had the sheets to ward off the chill. But hearing the sound of something crashing in the bathroom, she didn’t bother to put on pants. She simply headed straight to the bathroom and pushed the almost closed door open.
She was anything but prepared for the mess she saw. A half-crushed box of tampons lie in the middle of the floor, a couple tampons strewn about near the toilet and on the bath mat. Her birth control was in said toilet. Toilet paper had been unraveled, and both the tube of toothpaste and bottle of lubricant were spilled on the tile. And standing in the middle of the mess was a disheveled Rachel.
“What did you do?” Cuddy demanded, angrier than she intended. Her head pounded as she hurled the words out. She didn’t mean to sound so furious, but she felt hung over and grouchy, and like a dial stuck to one channel, she found herself unable to be patient.
“I -”
“Why did you make this mess?” She clutched her head with one of her hands as her headache seemed to get worse.
“I said I wanted to play,” Rachel reminded her.
Cuddy forced herself to inhale and exhale a few times to prevent herself from losing her temper. As awful as this was, she knew she was reacting to the drugs, to the way her body was responding to whatever the hell was in her body. It wasn’t about Rachel, and she couldn’t let it be.
“You have toys,” Cuddy said in a tone that she tried very hard to make it seem calm.
“I got bored.”
“Well… that’s not an excuse. You can’t just….” Her voice trailed off as she noticed the brown pill bottle carelessly laying on the sink. The top had popped off, and several of the pills had spilled out, which made it possible for her to see what drug it was. Her haze made it difficult to get to the conclusion that seemed right on the tip of her tongue. “A bathroom’s not….” And then she realized:
It was Vicodin.
Immediately she felt wide awake. All of her senses were heightened, and her heart began to race with the possibility that Rachel had been playing with House’s Vicodin. Instantly, Cuddy grabbed the bottle.
“Were you playing with this?” she demanded to know. So much for not losing her temper, she thought. “Were you?”
Rachel was taken aback by the question. “No,” she said hesitantly.
“Rachel.”
“I didn’t!”
Cuddy didn’t believe her. “Did you take any of them?”
“No -”
“Honey, this is very important,” she said sternly. “If you took one, you need to let me know. Even if you didn’t think it was bad for you, I need you to tell me if you swallowed one of these.”
The seriousness in her voice scared Rachel. Cuddy could see it happening. The more she tried to stress how important this all was, the more her daughter was beginning to think that she had done something wrong. And technically pill or no pill, she had done something wrong, very wrong, in making the bathroom look like this. But all this insistence about the Vicodin took away from that and clearly made Rachel confused and fearful.
“No,” she answered after a second. “Don’t like medicine. It’s yucky.”
“Are you sure?” Cuddy didn’t mean to badger, but this was as serious a matter as it got. If Rachel had taken a pill because she’d thought it was candy or because she was bored, she needed to say that now. Obviously she was denying it, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, did it?
Of course, by being insistent, Cuddy had guaranteed that her daughter would be too afraid to tell the truth if she had taken some of the Vicodin. She would see her mother, who was being, admittedly, unintentionally hysterical, and she would be too fearful to say what she had done. She would assume that she would be in trouble, and wanting to avoid that, she would lie… even if lying was dangerous in this instance.
“Uh huh. Didn’t play with them,” she said with a nod of the head.
“You’re sure about this?”
“I taked none!” Rachel screamed, apparently having had enough of this line of questioning.
Cuddy’s eyes narrowed on her as she made that outburst. “Don’t talk to me like that, Rachel,” she said firmly. “I’m -”
“No! I don’t like pills! And -”
“The next person who screams,” a tired voice interrupted. “Is going to be getting a buttload of pills to shut them up if they don’t stop yelling.”
House wasn’t kidding either.
Their squabbling had woken him up minutes ago, and though he had tried to ignore their fighting, they had made that impossible. They had made him get out of bed, when he could have been sleeping, to interrupt their argument.
Glancing around the bathroom, he could easily see why everyone was upset; the room had been trashed. And between that unpleasant sight, the party he was going to have to go to in the near future, and their angry voices, he was in no mood to deal with this fight of theirs.
He would, of course, step in, if only to shut them up. But he’d run out of patience before he’d stepped over the threshold to the bathroom. And if they both insisted on yelling, he really wasn’t going to be above jamming a few pills down their gullet as though they were hyper, overreactive, neurotic terriers.
“What is going on?” he asked in that way that said he didn’t really care what was going on; he just wanted everyone to shut up.
Immediately Rachel ran towards him. He thought she was scampering to escape, trying to avoid whatever punishment she knew she would get for, evidently, unwrapping several of Cuddy’s tampons and squeezing toothpaste all over the place. But Rachel didn’t try to duck out the door. She simply moved next to him, as though he were going to protect her from her crazy mother.
He didn’t exactly enjoy the picture that painted in his mind. But his discomfort was only surpassed by Cuddy’s. Seeing her own child seek some reassurance in him seemed to make her angry - and not at Rachel, but at him.
He wasn’t sure if her irritation was because Rachel seemed to like him at all or because Rachel seemed to think that he would back her up in this fight. The latter certainly would have been a more reasonable conclusion, given the circumstances. Yet House knew that Cuddy could be anything but rational when it came to her daughter. And as much as she said she wanted him to have a relationship with Rachel, sometimes Cuddy behaved as though sharing Rachel was the last thing she wanted.
Of course, he could understand that. Cuddy loved her daughter and wanted to be able to do everything for her. With her job, that was obviously not possible, and he supposed that no one could ever really single handedly give their child everything he or she wanted. But Cuddy was… well, Cuddy. She didn’t easily recognize logical limitations or let that stop her from striving for better. Professionally that made her an adept problem solver; professionally it was the reason he had a job at all. Yet that kind of thinking didn’t always translate well to their home. She wanted to be the one to give Rachel everything, to do everything for her. And when that didn’t happen, when Rachel came to him for something, that was obviously upsetting to her.
Knowing that he was not surprised she turned to him in anger. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on,” she told him in a way that sounded like an accusation.
He didn’t deny the charge. “Well, to be fair, I was hoping to understand absolutely none of it on account of being unconscious. But since you both woke me up, I have no choice but to -”
“She got in your Vicodin stash,” she nearly shouted.
Suddenly he could understand why she was upset. The problem was two-fold; like everything else, it couldn’t just be one thing motivating her fear. Sure, there was the terrifying idea that Rachel had ingested some of the medication. But House knew that in the back of Cuddy’s mind, there was an equally problematic concern for her.
She had been the one to let the Vicodin in the house. It was his obviously, but he would have been to content to keep it in his car, in a hollowed out book at work, in his apartment - anywhere else. But she had insisted that it be here. If he were going to take the drug, she wanted it to be as open and blatant as possible so that she could monitor his use. In other words, through no encouragement of his own, she had demanded he bring the drug into their home. And if Rachel had taken any, Cuddy would think how she had been the one to cause that scenario.
She would hate herself for that, and chances were, even if Rachel hadn’t swallowed a single pill, Cuddy would regret her actions. Which meant that he could no longer keep the drug here, he thought. She hadn’t said anything yet, and it might take her a while to actually broach the topic, but she wouldn’t want the Vicodin in her home any longer. Regardless of what she’d initially thought was best for him, she would want it gone in order to protect her daughter.
Truth be told, he was okay with that. After all, it wasn’t like he had wanted the Vicodin here. She had created that scenario. But, thinking that her mind was already teeming with personal guilt, he decided that that was not something he should say. In fact, given the way she was reacting, he felt that right now there was only thing to do:
Diffuse the situation as best he could.
Looking down at Rachel, he picked her up. He wanted to be able to look her in the eyes and at the same time, ensure that she couldn’t run away.
“Put me down,” she whined.
He ignored her. “Did you take one of those -”
“No,” she snarled, her legs kicking about wildly.
He responded by hugging her to his body.
With her secure in his grasp, he knew he was in no danger of being kicked. She would try; he understood she would try, but she wouldn’t be able to hurt him.
Turning his attention back to Cuddy, he said, “She says she didn’t take one.”
That wasn’t enough for her. “And you think she’s going to tell the truth if -”
“I think she is telling the truth.”
Cuddy wasn’t wrong to think that Rachel might lie. Given the way Cuddy was behaving, that actually seemed like a perfectly reasonable response. But House had looked in Rachel’s eyes, and he had seen honesty. She had many visible and audible tells when she lied, and he had noticed absolutely none of them.
Cuddy didn’t seem convinced. “But -”
“Rachel,” he said, not letting Cuddy finish her sentence. “If you took a pill -”
“I didn’t!” she screamed.
“But if you did, we would have take you to the hospital, because you would get really sick. And if you didn’t take one, then you’ll have tons of fun cleaning all of this up,” he explained. “Either way, the next hour or so is gonna suck for you, so there’s no point in lying.”
Rachel looked apoplectic with anger, her cheeks were so red. “Didn’t. lie,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Then you can start cleaning,” he told her cheerfully. Putting her down on the ground once more, he gestured towards the mess she had made. She hesitated to pick anything up, so he gave her a small push toward the spilled tube of toothpaste. “Go on,” he said.
Rachel looked like she was wishing she had taken some Vicodin, a pain he was all too familiar with. But she did start to clean up. As she started balling up the toilet paper strewn about the room, he turned his attention to Cuddy, who seemed equal parts angry and confused.
Reaching for her, he tucked his fingers into the waistband of her panties. His button down covered her on that front, but having dressed her, he knew exactly where to hook his fingers. Tugging her toward him, he said, “You come with me.”
“House.” She was uncomfortable with his hand that close to her vagina when her daughter was in the room with them. Quickly Cuddy shoved his hand away, but she followed him back out into their bedroom anyway. When they were alone once more, she said, “You can’t do that in front of her. You can’t -”
“You need to relax,” he told her gently, pulling her into a hug. His embrace was warm and just what she wanted, but it didn’t make her feel any better.
“I can’t,” she confessed. Her voice turning accusatory, she said, “Whatever you put in that tea…. I can’t - I just want to go back to sleep.”
“Then do it,” he said, like there was nothing else she had to do today, like she could easily just do that without any consequences. “There’s still some time.”
“No, there’s not,” she whined into his chest. Rubbing her face against his soft t-shirt, she said, “I need to wake up, start getting ready.”
He patted her back. “Then go make yourself some tea or use that espresso machine I got you that you never use and wake up. I’ll make sure Rachel cleans the bathroom.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think -”
“Then do whatever you want,” he said dismissively. “But seriously? You’re gonna have to put on pants if you’re going to keep acting like this. You look ridiculous.”
She half scoffed, half laughed. She supposed she did look ridiculous. “Fine,” she agreed. “I’m gonna make coffee.”
As she pulled away from him, he asked, “Make me a cup?”
“Yeah. Sure. You’ll keep an eye on her?” He nodded his head. “All right.”
She started to walk away, but he called after her. “I’m serious about the pants thing,” he told her. “I see legs and thighs, and I -”
“I will put on pants,” she said turning back to him. “If you keep it in yours.”
House shrugged. “Okay.”
Frankly, given how many times he’d fucked her this weekend, not doing her again was a pretty easy request to handle. He hadn’t exactly been kidding when he spoke of the effect her legs were having on him, but sex was the last thing he wanted right now.
“She threw my birth control into the toilet,” Cuddy told him, perhaps thinking he really did want to have sex with her.
“Why would she -”
“I have no idea,” she said with a shrug.
“Well, thank God your mouth can’t -”
“I have another pack under the sink.”
That didn’t comfort him. “Assuming she didn’t build a fort with them.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I’m letting you know so you don’t freak out when you see the pills in the toilet.”
He nodded his head. “Understood. I’ll try not to cut off my own dick at the prospect of getting you pregnant.”
House hadn’t wanted to sex to begin with. But knowing that there was a possibility she didn’t have birth control, he really didn’t care that her legs looked enticing right then. Playing with what existed between those legs could lead to bad things.
He could get her pregnant if he weren’t careful and Rachel had ruined all of the birth control in the home.
For that reason it was easy for him to watch her walk away without feeling the urge to jump her.
Turning away from her, he headed back to the bathroom. Rachel was mopping up toothpaste with some toilet paper, which was just making the mess even bigger.
“Don’t do that,” he told her calmly. She looked up at him, unhappiness putting the frown on her face. “You’re just going to make a mess. A bigger mess.” Pointing to the tampons all along the ground, he said, “You clean those up. I’ll take care of the spill.”
She nodded okay, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Picking up Mommy’s crotch corks was a lot easier than wiping up toothpaste and lube - as he discovered quickly. As he started to clean up the mess with paper towels and some lemon-scented spray Cuddy kept under the sink, he realized that it was actually going to take some effort. The lube was slick, the toothpaste sticky, and it was hard to get the right amount of traction that would allow him to clean both substances off the ground.
“House?” Rachel asked.
“Hmm?”
He didn’t look at her, but she used the applicator to launch a tampon at his face anyway. Then he did look over at her, and she laughed.
“You think that’s funny?”
“Uh huh.” He made a gimme motion. “Here. Give me another one.” She handed him an unwrapped tampon. “That’s nothing,” he told her, easily getting the tampon out of its plastic applicator.
Two tampons in hand, he gingerly pushed them into his nostrils. When they were in far enough to stay there on their own, he screwed his face up to exaggerate the effect.
Seeing him do that made Rachel laugh boisterously. Unfortunately, it was at that moment that Cuddy decided to return with mugs of coffee in her hand. And when she saw him, she was definitely not amused by his antics.
“What are you doing?” she asked as though he were a complete idiot.
He pulled a tampon out by the string and held it out for her to take. “Nothing, dear. Just getting one of these out for your convenience… since clearly you could use one right about now.”
She still wasn’t laughing, and he smirked at her in defiance.
“Rachel,” Cuddy said calmly. “You’re done here. Go play.”
The bathroom was barely cleaned, but Rachel was smart enough to know better than to fight. If her mother said she could leave, of course she was going to do just that. And no one was surprised when she took off as quickly as her chubby legs could go.
As soon as she was gone, Cuddy kicked the door shut behind her. “You know I can’t use those now, right?”
He pulled the other tampon out and threw both in the trash. “Oh well.”
“You shouldn’t encourage her to do those kinds of things. Now she’s going to want to play in here -”
“No, she’s not,” he interrupted. “No kid is going to want to play in the bathroom when -”
“If that were true, this mess wouldn’t exist,” she pointed out, handing him his mug of coffee.
He took a sip. It was sweeter than he liked, but he didn’t complain. It was strong, which was really what he needed. The jolt of caffeine made it possible for him to consider her words… and deny that they were true. “You think she’s going to come in here to play after your reaction?”
Cuddy gazed down at her feet, her fingers nervously toying with the handle of her own mug.
“Yeah,” she agreed quietly. “You might be right about that.”
“I am right about that,” he asserted.
“Of course. Cause you’re always right when it comes to Rachel.”
The comment hit a little too closely to home for him to truly react to it with any sort of humor. No, he thought darkly, he was rarely right when it came to dealing with Rachel. Hadn’t his own behavior this weekend proved as much?
But he refused to let that doubt show. Though he didn’t see any humor in the situation, he forced himself to handle the moment casually.
He stuck his tongue out at her. “Now see, here I was, going to offer to reach into the toilet and grab your birth control myself.”
“And now?”
“Well now you can do this all by yourself, the great pant-less wonder,” he said, gesturing to her still bare legs.
She smiled. “House, if you don’t help me, my birth control isn’t going to be the only thing in the toilet bowl.”
“I don’t understand. You’re gonna make me stand in the -”
“I’m going to drown you if you get up and leave me,” she threatened.
This time he was the one who smiled. “Okay,” he said setting his mug to the side. Leaning back against the tub, he held his arms open as though he welcomed the challenge. “Let’s see you do that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re threatening to drown me. I’d like to see how you plan on getting me anywhere near the toilet.”
She glared at him. “You are infuriating. And I probably have more physical strength than -”
“Yes, I imagine with breasts and an ass that big, it must take considerable effort to remain upright,” he said with a nod of the head.
“You’re an idiot.” She was smiling anyway.
“But I’m not wrong.”
Gingerly she placed her mug on the countertop.
“Oh,” he said patronizingly. “So it’s not enough for you to just be wrong. You need to actually prove that you’re not right about this.” Without a word she moved towards him. “That’s fine,” he continued. When she stood in front of him, he told her, “I like being this close to your vagina. That’s cool.”
She grabbed hold of his t-shirt to try to move him, but of course that wasn’t going to work. Her hands moved to his head, and though he said, “Ow,” when she tugged a little too hard, she still failed.
In fact, as he roped an arm around her thighs and pulled her near him, all she managed to do was get closer to her. “I don’t think this is working,” he told her when she was pressed against him.
She stopped pulling at him then. Her body nearly going limp, she abruptly shifted gears. Leaning down she kissed him on top of his head. “Fine,” she capitulated. “But if there’s ever a fire, you should know I’m not dragging your ass out.”
“I would challenge you on that, but I’m not going to set a fire and sit in it to prove you’re wrong,” he said, running his chin along one of her knees.
“Well that would be a first.”
He shrugged. “Don’t you worry.” He patted her ass gently. “I’ll remember this conversation in case there ever is a fire, and we’ll see who’s right then.”
“And if I let you die?”
“Then I’d expect a little haunting to be done.”
“You’d turn into a ghost?”
“Oh yeah. I hope your ass is prepared for some paranormal activity.” He paused for a moment before specifying, “And I do mean your ass specifically, not -”
“Are you really talking about having sex with me as a ghost?”
Well, when she put it like that, it did seem rather ridiculous. “Sorry,” he said immediately. “Cleaning supplies must have -”
“I’m sure.”
“So you see, I really can’t help you keep cleaning….”
“Fine,” she said pulling away from him. “I’ll do it all by myself.”
He knew what she was doing, giving him the option of walking away so that he would stay. It was a cheap way to make him feel guilty, an easy way, and he understood that. He could see it for what it was. But she had had such a difficult weekend as it was that he could not get up and walk away from this mess. Under normal circumstances, sure, he could do that. Today though it would seem cruel to leave her alone to clean up the entire bathroom. Today when she needed him, to deny her even the slightest bit of help would be wrong.
“Never mind,” he grumbled.
She had to turn away from him then so that he wouldn’t see the triumphant smile on her face. He liked to think that he was the one who controlled their relationship, and certainly he’d exploited her physical weakness during that last round to show that he could do what he wanted and she couldn’t make him do anything different. But in the end, she had won the round. She might not have been able to physically move him, but Cuddy had plenty of other tricks up her sleeves to get what she wanted.
“Oh shut up,” he snapped, somehow sensing what she was thinking. “Just because you got what you wanted doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know,” she agreed. “It just means I got what I wanted.”
He scowled but dropped the matter altogether. For that she was honestly grateful. She loved him dearly, and they were having a playful discussion, but one wrong remark about who was in charge, and they would be fighting. And the last thing she wanted was to argue with him.
Unfortunately that seemed almost inevitable when, five minutes later, he asked, “Why isn’t Rachel doing this again?”
“I don’t want her to get dirty before the party.”
“Well, I’ve got the messy part,” he pointed out. “It’s not….” His voice trailed off in that way it did when he was coming to some sort of conclusion. “You let her go, because you felt guilty for yelling at her,” he said knowingly.
“No. I just told you what my reason -”
“I know what you said. I also know that that reason doesn’t make any sense.”
She sighed loudly, reaching into the toilet to grab her birth control pills. Immediately she tossed them into the trash. As they hit the bottom of the can with a thunk, she asked him, “Does it really matter? If I let her go because I feel bad, does it really bother you that much?”
“So you’re admitting it,” he said, ignoring her question.
“I’m just asking -”
“It would matter to me, sure,” he admitted as though that were a given. “You shouldn’t let her get away with things, because you feel guilty. Or else, ten years from now, she’s going to be like that brat on The Real Housewives of Jersey, and I’m going to have to be the one to buy her another car.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ashley or is it Ashlee these days?” he wondered out loud. She could only assume he was wondering, anyway; he certainly shouldn’t have been looking to her for an answer.
When he watched that crap, it was generally when he couldn’t sleep and she was unconscious next to him. She had no clue what he was talking about, as her only glimpses of the show had been when she’d woken up and demanded he go elsewhere to watch it.
In the end, he didn’t wait around for her to give him an answer one way or the other. He simply continued talking. “Whatever. I’m just saying, if she doesn’t have to clean up this mess, she’ll do it again.”
She turned to give him a pointed look. “But according to your logic, I’ve already freaked out and scared her, and she won’t play in the bathroom again. That’s what you said.”
He frowned. “I don’t like it when you’re smarter than me.”
“I do.”
She was happy that he let the comment go without a rebuttal or pointing out that he was typically the smarter of the two. Instead, he simply said, “Well, at least Rachel will be in a good mood since she didn’t have to clean up.”
Cuddy was doubtful of that though. And fast-forward a couple hours later, she understood that she had had good reason to doubt that.
Rachel had already expressed her feelings over this party. She didn’t want to go, and despite knowing there were no other options, she still felt as though complaining were the appropriate way to handle this. Frankly, Cuddy could deal with the whining. She didn’t like it, but it was tolerable for the most part, because she could easily ignore it.
But when she tried to get Rachel dressed, it was no longer possibly to pretend that this wasn’t happening. “Come on,” Cuddy said, practically dragging Rachel into her bedroom. “We need to get you dressed.”
“Why? You’re not dressed. I wanna play.”
“I’m waiting for House to get out of the bathroom, and then I’ll get showered and get dressed,” she explained.
Rachel slowly moved further into the room. “Then why do I -”
“Because Mommy wants you ready to go.” Cuddy pulled open her daughter’s closet doors. “Now get undressed.”
Rachel stomped her foot. “I don’t wanna go.”
“I know, but that’s not an option.”
Understanding that that was the case, Cuddy went straight for the dress she knew would improve Rachel’s mood. On the whole, Rachel was neither prone to being girly or tomboyish. She neither loved nor hated clothes for the most part. But she really did love one of the dresses she owned.
It was purple but a shade so dark that it almost looked navy. It was made of silk ruffles from top to bottom, and she loved how soft it was against her skin. More than anything though, she liked being able to twirl around to make the ruffles dance. It was sleeveless and would require a sweater to be worn with it. And the prospect of having to shove Rachel into tights was not exactly one Cuddy was looking forward to. But it would be worth it if Rachel had something to be happy about, something to distract her from all of the things she wanted to complain about.
“Look,” Cuddy said, trying to pull Rachel’s attention away from pouting. “You can wear your dress.”
Rachel’s eyes immediately lit up. “Really?”
“Uh huh.” Cuddy laid the dress flat on Rachel’s bed. “But we need to get you undressed. And you’ve got to promise me you’ll try not to spill anything on it.”
“I promise,” Rachel said instantly and without hesitation.
“All right. Let’s skin the cat.”
Rachel held her arms straight up in the air, so Cuddy could peel off the sweatshirt the little girl was wearing.
“Can you take off your pants and your socks by yourself?”
Rachel nodded her head. Cuddy turned away from her so she could discretely pull out a pair of tights and a cardigan. Too busy taking off her pants, Rachel didn’t notice.
“Why do you say skin the cat?” she asked, kicking her pants off at the ankles.
“I don’t know,” Cuddy answered after a moment’s consideration. “I guess… my father said it to me a few times when I was little. I guess it stuck with me.”
Rachel reached down to tug off her socks. “I don’t think it’s nice to skin cats.”
“No,” Cuddy agreed. “It’s not.”
“Can I have a cat?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You have allergies,” she said, turning around with the tights in her hand.
As soon as she did, Rachel saw them. The joy she’d felt instantly died. Her face fell as she understood that her mother wanted to put her in tights.
“No,” she whined. “I don’t want tights!”
“You’re gonna get cold without them, baby,” Cuddy tried to explain.
But that didn’t make any difference. Rachel didn’t want to them, and there was nothing Cuddy could say that would change that. That meant there was no point in trying to rationalize why tights were needed. There was no use in trying to make Rachel understand, because she would always say that she didn’t want to wear them.
“Come on,” Cuddy said, gesturing with her free hand to the bed. “Sit down, so Mommy can put them -”
“No!”
Cuddy wasn’t dismayed. “This isn’t optional. You have to wear them. That’s all there is to it. Now sit down.”
The increased firmness in her voice didn’t have any effect on Rachel. Or rather they had an effect; it was just the opposite of what Cuddy wanted. Because as soon as she had made it clear that there were going to be tights involved and there was no way around it, Rachel took off - sprinting nearly naked through the rest of the house.
At first Cuddy didn’t want to dignify Rachel with the response of chasing after her. She simply called out, “Get back here, Rachel. Right now.” When that didn’t work, she knew she had no choice but to follow after her.
By then though, Rachel had had enough time to run and hide. She wasn’t sure why Mommy hadn’t followed after her right away. Normally she was good at catching her and taking her back. But this time, Rachel had managed to run away.
She was happy about that… until she realized she needed to hide. Mommy wouldn’t stay where she was for forever. She would realize what had happened and come after her. And she would be mad, so she would be mad at Rachel when she found her, and Rachel didn’t want that to happen. Cause when Mommy was mad, that meant it was time out time.
But she wasn’t sure where she should hide. Mommy was in her room, so that meant she couldn’t hide in there, because Mommy would see her, and it would be easy to catch her. She couldn’t run outside, because that wasn’t allowed, and even if it was, she was pretty much naked, so she would get cold. She didn’t like being cold.
Mommy always checked under the dining room table, so Rachel thought that that wasn’t a very good option.
“Rachel.” She didn’t dare turn around at hearing her mother’s voice. She didn’t want to see Mommy looking for her or worse, looking at her, so she made an immediate choice to sprint for the nearest hiding spot she could find.
In this case, it was House’s office. Actually, that sounded like a good idea, because she wasn’t allowed in House’s office, and Mommy wouldn’t look in here anyway.
But the second Rachel slipped into the room and closed the door behind her, she thought it wasn’t a very good choice at all.
House was in there. He was playing a videogame on the television he kept in here, but he clearly saw her. Because the moment she realized he was in here, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Um… nothing,” she lied, not knowing what she should say.
“Do you need something?”
“No,” she said tiptoeing in the room further.
He looked over at her. Even from this distance, in his estimation, she looked guilty. She stood there, naked except for a pair of underwear. But written all over her features was fear that he only ever saw when she was worried she was going to be caught for doing something.
Instantly he understood that she was hiding from Cuddy. Whatever she’d done, she had earned her mother’s disapproval, and she was avoiding being punished, he figured.
Part of House knew that at that moment, he should have been calling out for Cuddy. She would have obviously been looking for her daughter by then. If Rachel were trying to hide and the quiet manner in which she’d shut the door suggested that she was, then clearly that was because Cuddy was looking for her. And he guessed, although he hadn’t read it recently, that it was in the boyfriend handbook that he should have let Cuddy know her daughter was here.
But that wasn’t what he did.
Obviously Cuddy would find her kid eventually. It wasn’t like Rachel had run away, and his knowledge would help bring her back alive. They were in the safety of their own home, and Cuddy would inevitably discover that Rachel was in here - either because she thought Rachel might hide in here or because she would come ask for his help.
In other words, the matter would resolve itself.
… And really, House didn’t feel like getting involved. Maybe he would have under other circumstances, but the ice world was the hardest to get through in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and he’d died so many times already that he was on his last penguin suit as it was. He guessed he could have paused, but given his luck, when he finally got to play again, he’d forget where he was, and a floating penguin would kill him. And if he could avoid the indignity of another continue, he was going to do that.
Still he reached over and patted the bit of couch next to him. “Sit down.”
She did though she seemed wary of the offer.
“Take the blanket,” he said gesturing with his head to the throw that was on the back of the loveseat. “Cover yourself up. You’ll be cold otherwise.”
It also would make hanging out with her a little less awkward for him. Somehow her being naked just made the whole thing seem creepy when he knew that it wasn’t.
When she’d draped the throw over her shoulders, she asked, “Can I play?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I already started my game. And you need to get ready to go to the party.”
“You need to get ready to go to the party,” she said like a brat.
He gestured towards the freshly pressed pants and shirt he was wearing. His jacket had been carelessly tossed onto his desk chair, but it was nearby. “I am ready.”
“Oh.”
“Go find your Mommy and have her get you ready.”
“No!” It was clear she definitely didn’t want to do that. “I wanna play the game.”
“Too bad.”
When she tried to grab at the controller, he was quick and moved out of the way. But the damage was already done. The jump his Mario had been trying to make fell short. And his penguined plumber fell into the gap. House tried to get Mario to hit one of the cliff walls so that he could jump back up and stay alive.
But that didn’t work.
And Mario died.
Continue on to the rest of the chapter