fic: Chimera — Chapter 2
Aug. 23rd, 2015 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readingrat‘Optimising’ travel time, her travel agent called it when she booked her flight. She leaves Philadelphia on Thursday at 6 p.m., reaching Paris eight hours later at 8 a.m. local time. The downside: sleeping on the plane. The upside: she has the whole day ahead of her. She’ll get three full days in Paris at the expense of only one working day. She still can’t believe her good fortune: Julia volunteering for an extended weekend of babysitting and Wilson providing her with an excuse to move further afield than the Poconos. He was gently persuasive, asking her to consider it his treat to make up for all that she’d been through because of him and citing her long-cherished dream to visit France as an additional incentive. A trip to France in exchange for half a liver — why not?
Unfortunately, Julia read more into the vacation than was called for. Although she was too discreet to give relationship advice, she had a habit of trying to set Cuddy up with ‘suitable candidates’, as their mother once put it. Ever since House literally crashed Cuddy’s date with Julia’s colleague Jerry, Julia’s matchmaking efforts had been put on the back burner, but when she drove Cuddy to the airport that unmistakeable gleam in her eye was back again. Cuddy didn’t bother to disillusion her; she was only too aware how her continued proximity to Wilson and their increasingly intimate living arrangement must appear to outsiders. She would have liked to explain to Julia that theirs was an alliance of convenience (Pete would call it ‘desperation’), but Julia was in a romantic haze, commending Wilson for upgrading Cuddy’s flight to business class, remarking on his good manners, and expressing her approval of Wilson as a potential boyfriend without actually saying so.
Cuddy doesn’t know whether to be glad that her family is prepared to overcome their natural prejudices, accepting a three times divorced dry alcoholic for her sake, or whether she should feel insulted that they would consider her to be the lucky one if she and Wilson got together. The truth of the matter is that her family has reached the stage where they will happily root for anyone who isn’t House. Which isn’t exactly flattering, but if she’s honest with herself she has to admit that she, too, has given up hope of happiness within a relationship. She’s forty-nine, her longest relationship lasted for a year, she has a disabled child, and if her mother is to be believed, she has unrealistic expectations and impossibly high standards. Julia, more tactful, once noted that if she wanted a reliable and steady guy, she shouldn’t date exciting, slightly creepy bad boys.
Her mother is wrong about her expectations. Her standards aren’t too high: she dated Lucas Douglas for a year. Sure, he has his good sides, such as being a family guy, but he’s still the least mature man she ever dated, and sexually — oy vey! She shouldn’t have let him get away with his masculine brand of selfishness, but at forty plus she’d been grateful to be found desirable at all. And Julia is wrong about her wanting a steady, reliable guy. She can deal with House-style erratic behaviour, being jerked around regularly and even being let down on occasion. It comes with the territory. What she can’t deal with is having to be the strong one, the one holding the fort, the one who glues everything together in the relationship.
In a way it’s all Julia’s fault — for having a husband like Rob. Rob, who is short, bald, and slightly paunchy, whose verbal utterances are mostly restricted to comments on the invariable ball game on television, and the highlights of whose life are vintage car rallies. (He has pointed out to her a number of times that the term ‘vintage’ is restricted to the era between nineteen-something and nineteen-something-else, and that the correct term is ‘antique’, but whatever.) Whenever her mother gripes that the prince she’s waiting for doesn’t exist, she looks at Rob and thinks that he does, only Julia has grabbed him.
It isn’t that she’s physically attracted to Rob; as a matter of fact, he’s the absolute opposite of the type she is attracted to. But whenever she’s almost convinced that the qualities she’s looking for don’t exist, watching Rob with Julia overturns that conviction. Taciturn, pragmatic Rob does things for Julia, not because he’s worried she’ll leave him if he doesn’t (Julia doesn’t know how to spell ‘dump’ or ‘break up’) or because he fears he won’t get laid (Julia couldn’t get mad if she tried), but because it makes Julia’s life easier — and that makes Rob happy. He puts up with his mother-in-law’s constant nagging and her subtle digs, because if he sniped back at her, Julia would get stressed. He looks after the kids and his MIL while Julia helps out at Cuddy’s place, because if Julia couldn’t come over to help out, she’d worry about Cuddy, and Rob doesn’t want her to worry. He doesn’t say a word about House in front of Cuddy, because if he got into a fight with his sister-in-law, Julia would feel torn, so it isn’t worth the hassle.
Dating House hadn’t been like that. Everything House had done for her had been fuelled by the fear that not doing it would lead to the end of the relationship. Doing something simply because it would make her life easier or make her happy, with no direct benefit to himself, had been foreign to his thought processes. If he babysat Rachel, it was to get laid. If he took her out on dates or attended official functions with her, it was to avoid getting dumped. It was never ever to make her life easier or simply to see her relaxed and smiling. And that was because he’d seen her as his crutch, as the drug he could lean on after kicking his Vicodin habit. Drugs and other crutches didn’t have needs or feelings; they were hard mistresses with unreasonable demands, but they didn’t expect support or empathy. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might need a crutch too, someone she could trust implicitly to do what was best for her even if it got him nowhere, someone who covered her back even if it meant a bullet through his heart.
(She remembers one of the fevered dreams she had during her cancer scare: she and House as the Sundance Kid and Butch, but when she’d run out to face the bullets, he had disappeared.)
Wilson could be the guy who took the flak for her, if he was interested in her, but she doubts that he has cast himself in that role. House needed her to lean on; Wilson, however, is still smarting from being the needy one after his stay in Mayfield and during his cancer treatment. He referred to it once as ‘leeching off her’and she doubts that his self-esteem will ever recover from having to accept sponge baths from her. It’s funny: she’d have thought that House with his overt masculinity and unrelenting sexism would need to be the strong one in a relationship, but it’s Wilson who has fixed ideas about his role as the ‘man’ in a relationship, and those notions don’t see him leaning on his partner to get through addiction, depression, or cancer.
It’s ten o’clock by the time the cab drops her off at Wilson’s conference hotel. Wilson must be in some session or other, so maybe she can have a nap. First she needs a shower, but before she has finished unpacking there’s a knock on the door. Is Wilson playing truant already?
She opens the door, but the corridor seems empty at first sight. Then she peers around the frame. “You?”
It’s Pete, leaning against the near wall, dressed in jeans, a white button-down shirt and Nikes, a backpack slung casually over his shoulder. A pair of sunglasses sticks out of his shirt pocket.
“Good to see you too,” he says.
She waves him into her room, wondering why she is surprised. “Does Wilson know you are here?”
“In your room? No. I don’t kiss and tell, or tell and kiss, as the case may be.”
“Here in Paris,” she elucidates, although she’s sure he knows what she’s trying to get at.
Pete gives her a pitying look. “Wilson and I don’t keep secrets from each other,” he says. “He’s yin to my yang, I’m the plug to his socket.”
When she swats him lightly he says, “I arrived the day he did. James Wilson’s Week Off is too good to be missed. The French aren’t much into non-alcoholic wines, so he isn’t having as much fun as I am.” He considers his last statement with a grimace. “Non-alcoholic wine and fun: definitely a paradox. So, Wilson isn’t having fun, period.”
She wonders why he’s rambling. It’s a sure sign that he’s nervous. Is he worried that she’ll let slip to Wilson the truth about Joel before he has an opportunity to confess? Because he definitely hasn’t done so yet: if he had, she’d have heard something about it from Wilson when he last talked to her. Which reminds her: “Why didn’t Wilson mention that you’re here?”
Pete twitches a cheek in a deprecatory grimace. “He was hoping I’d disappear before you appeared or that he could squeeze me back into the closet that I popped out of, so you wouldn’t discover his dirty little secret: he’s gay.”
“Sure,” Cuddy says equably. Pete’s sexual innuendos may be new territory for him, especially with regard to Wilson, but she had to listen to them for over a decade at PPTH. “And I’m a transsexual. Tell me something new.”
“I was going to leave yesterday, but then I heard that Wilson intended to leave you to your own devices while he presented his paper today, so I extended my stay by one day. I’ll be your friendly guide, showing you the sights and easing your way around Paris …” He pronounces it ‘Pah-ree’ the way her French teacher in high school used to. “… so you won’t get lost, mugged, or even worse, seduced by a Gallic gigolo.”
“Huh,” she says. “And how do you intend to find your way around Paris?” Pete is notorious for getting lost within the fairly modest confines of Philadelphia Central Hospital; allowing him to drive a car without GPS basically amounts to sending him on a round trip of the world.
“Ve haf zeese very clever devices,” Pete says, his ‘r’ guttural, pulling out his cell with a flourish and presenting it with a bow, “viz a special app for finding ze way.”
Cuddy can’t help giggling. “Okay, but I have to shower first.”
“Don’t mind me,” Pete says, sprawling on one of the chairs in the room.
“Oh, no,” Cuddy says and marches towards the door. “Out!” She holds the door open for him. “You can wait in the spacious lobby and check out the receptionists. They are all young and pretty.”
He pretends to be hurt, but does her bidding. She, for her part, takes a shower in record time, feeling gladder than she’d have expected at the prospect of his company. (They haven’t exactly been at ease with each other since their last break-up, and although working together to keep Wilson alive created a loose camaraderie, they’ve both instinctively avoided more intimate moments ever since. It doesn’t help that she knows more about Joel than he’s comfortable with.) She wouldn’t hesitate to launch herself into the streets of the city armed with a map and a guide book, but sightseeing all by herself would be a drab business. Where’s the fun in being awed by a world famous gothic cathedral — her first gothic cathedral — if there’s no one to share that awe with?
She dresses in jeans, a soft mauve sweater, and flat shoes, ties her damp hair back and applies light make-up. Her reflection returns her critical gaze with approval: casual and understated without appearing blowsy or careless of her appearance. There’s no reason why she should care; the French don’t know her and will never cross her path again, while Wilson has seen her in considerably worse disarray. As for Pete …
Instead of following that line of thought she dabs perfume behind her ears and on her wrists, realising too late that she’s using the wrong perfume, the taboo one, the one House gave her when they were dating. She brought it with her thinking that it would be just the thing if she had to attend a conference dinner with Wilson, not reckoning on meeting Pete here. Now that she thinks of it, it strikes her that she used the ‘wrong’ shampoo too. She switches to a different brand whenever Pete visits, but again, it didn’t occur to her that she might need her ersatz shampoo in Paris and she didn’t think to use the complimentary sample that the hotel provides. Short of showering again there’s nothing she can do about it now; she’ll just have to keep her distance and hope that he doesn’t recognise it.
A moment later she’s back in the bathroom, scrubbing behind her ears with a washcloth. Now her wrists, and did she dab the perfume anywhere else? She brought one of her everyday ‘work’ perfumes, a Lancôme and she applies that liberally, hoping it’ll cover everything else. She knows she’s a coward, and if Pete had any idea how far she’s prepared to bend over backwards to avoid memories of the past, he’d mock her. And no, she’s not going to shower again with a different shampoo, because that would be pathetic, even more pathetic than the extra dabs of Lancôme at the base of her throat.
Pete is in the lobby reading a newspaper, his legs stretched out comfortably. When she walks up to him he nods his approval at her get-up, throws the newspaper on the lobby table, and rises.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks, pulling a linen flat cap out of his backpack and putting it on.
“Lemme see.” She pulls out her guide book and checks the post-its she stuck into it. “Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, Sacré-Cœur, the Musée d’Orsay, …”
“Oh-kay,” Pete says, holding out a hand to stop her. “First of all, I’m not your average tourist guide. I’ll take you places you’ve never been before,” a leer punctuates that statement, “but I’m not prepared to spend the day in lines. If you haven’t booked online for the Louvre, you can forget it. The Eiffel Tower is a bore, the Tuileries are gardens, —”
“I know the Tuileries are gardens. So?”
He rolls his eyes. Plant life apparently isn’t on his agenda any more than lines are. They’re out on the road now, the morning sun pleasant rather than warm, the traffic, which is lighter than she’d thought it would be, dominated by scooters. They walk down the street past a café, and then up another street.
Pete looks around casually, but she isn’t fooled; he’s checking out landmarks, trying to stave off the inevitable — having to ask her to help him navigate — for as long as possible. “Sacré-Cœur is also off the map: Wilson insists that he’ll take you there himself. That leaves …”
“Why does he want to take me there?” The guide book says it’s a ‘must-see’, but it doesn’t really look like a ‘Wilson’ kind of place. She has him down as a Louvre and Notre Dame type of person. Sacré-Cœur is rather closer to kitsch than to Wilson.
“He says you’ve been ‘dying 2 go there 4eva’.”
“Me?” She stops and opens her guide book at the appropriate page, glad she stuck post-its in regardless of whether Pete thinks they’re ridiculously anal. No, her memory isn’t fooling her: Sacré-Cœur is that white marble meringue perched on a hill. Maybe it’s the sort of place you have to see in real life to appreciate its ‘magic’ and ‘grandeur’, but there’s no way she’s been hankering to go there all her life. Hell, she didn’t even know it existed until she started preparing for this trip.
“Yep, you. He said you’ve wanted to see Montmartre since you were old enough to spell it, and Sacré-Cœur is in Montmartre.” Pete’s eyes narrow, then he grins. “Don’t tell me he got you mixed up with some other girlfriend!”
“Montmartre?” she repeats to make sure she hasn’t misheard. Pete pronounces everything the French way, which means she has to translate it into something she can understand. Her high school French classes weren’t strong on verbal skills. The artists’ quarter? (Picasso and Matisse spring to mind, but she isn’t about to make a complete fool of herself by checking in the guide book to make sure.) “Mont- …? Oh, he got that wrong. Not Montmartre.”
“Then where? Montparnasse? There’s nothing there.” He scrutinises her. “No, not Montparnasse either. So, which hill was it that you wanted to see?”
He isn’t about to let it slide, so she says reluctantly, “Mont Saint-Michel.”
Taking a deep breath, Pete chuckles. And then laughs. “Mont Saint-Michel. Oh my God! Wilson fucked it up — he’s off by over 200 miles. Though if he skipped the closing session tomorrow morning, you could do it. You’d be on the road all day, but —”
“No, it’s fine,” she says quickly. Mont Saint-Michel will always be linked to House in her mind, to his futile attempt to get both of them there at the beginning of their relationship. She hadn’t wanted to take Rachel with them on such a long trip (it would have been a nightmare and a romance-killer) nor had she wanted to start off their relationship by neglecting Rachel in order to be with her new boyfriend — she’d thought it would send the wrong signal to House and to Rachel regarding her priorities — so she’d essentially chickened out when he’d gotten down to booking their flights. He’d been hurt, though he had understood. He’d always understood, sometimes too well.
“So, where are you going to take me?” she asks, determined to change the topic before he has an epiphany and manages to connect Mont Saint-Michel to himself.
He’s agreeable to doing Notre Dame and the Musée d’Orsay, the latter probably only because of Courbet’s larger-than-life vagina, but he endures her beloved impressionists with stoicism. As for Notre Dame, he’s blasé about it while they’re in the line, pretending that the visit was a chore to which he’d never subject himself if it weren’t for her, but as they roam around the cathedral, every now and then she finds herself waiting for him while he lags behind, sunk in contemplation. He drops little titbits of information about gothic architecture, stained glass, and the statics of flying buttresses, subjects on which she is completely ignorant. And later, up on the tower, she catches him sticking out his tongue at one of the gargoyles. Now gargoyles and Pete will forever be intertwined in her memory.
By the time they’re done with all that and have walked over the Pont Neuf (which smells of urine) it’s late afternoon. Pete parks her on a bench and disappears (she hopes that he’ll find his way back with his navigation app, but to be on the safe side she gets out her map so she can figure out where he is if he should phone to say he’s gotten lost), reappearing twenty minutes later with a baguette sticking out of his backpack.
“Is that the authentic French gourmet dinner you promised me?” Cuddy asks, wondering why she’s surprised.
“Don’t judge it before you’ve tried it,” Pete says.
They stroll along the banks of the Seine, where a waterside road has been converted into a car-free zone. Half of Paris is here, walking, running, cycling, or skating. Students with bottles of wine and plastic cups lounge on strips of verdure, tourists sit on stones overlooking the water, families with picnic baskets are spreading whole meals on blankets and along benches. On the river a packed tourist barge churns up the water, while the guide’s amplified voice informs them that the building on the left-hand side is the famous XYZ, built in the year so-and-so. Around her Cuddy can hear French, but also lots of Spanish, and every now and then English, German, and Japanese.
Cuddy feels herself relaxing for the first time in days — no, weeks. She’s had a good time so far, but art galleries can be exhausting and gothic cathedrals give you a crick in the neck. Besides, although she isn’t wearing heels, all that walking and standing around is killing her feet. Ambling along beside Pete, with no agenda and no worries that she’s missing the significance of some objet d’art, is calming the way that yoga is. Maybe this is better than sitting in some posh restaurant with white linen tablecloths and artistically folded napkins, hoping that Pete won’t antagonise the waiters.
When they’ve walked about a mile Pete stops at a group of beams piled up to make a seating arrangement. It’s fairly quiet along this stretch of the river, probably because there are no major tourist attractions in the vicinity, so they have the seats to themselves. Pete takes out linen napkins with the hotel logo printed on them (Cuddy rolls her eyes, but it’s too late anyway and she guesses she can return them discreetly) and spreads them out in lieu of a tablecloth. He takes off his hat, lines it with another napkin, and places it in the middle of the tablecloth. Then he takes out a humongous Swiss knife with just about every tool one can think of, chooses the miniature saw, and cuts the baguette into slices that he places in his hat.
“Voilà,” he says, before stretching out his hand imperatively. “Guide book?”
She hands it over, mystified. He places it next to the hat, covers it with a paper napkin (he has run out of linen ones, it seems), and then takes a number of small packages out of his backpack. Those turn out to be different cheeses. He cuts wedges or slices off each cheese and places those on the guide book, garnishing the arrangement with grapes and walnuts that he’s brought in a little Tupperware box. He also unwraps a pat of butter, and he groups strawberries, peaches, and grapes in a corner of his makeshift table. Finally he takes out two disposable cups and a bottle of Pinot Noir, uncorking the latter with the corkscrew of his Swiss knife. He pours a mouthful into one of the plastic cups, swirls it around and takes an experimental sip, making a great show of tasting it, eyes closed in pantomimic ecstasy.
Cuddy shakes her head reluctantly. “Not for me, please. I think I’ll have some water.”
He cocks a questioning eyebrow at her, but pulls out a small bottle of Perrier which he unscrews before handing it to her. “Then I guess I can drink straight from the bottle,” he says, taking a swig.
He feeds her cheese and baguette, regaling her with anecdotes and obscure facts about each of the cheeses, most of which she suspects he’s making up along the way.
“The cows that produce the milk for the Comté,” he says, “get a hectare of pasture each. That’s a hundred cows per square kilometre, max.”
She learnt the metric system in school and she knows that there are 1.6 kilometres to a mile, but there’s no way she can convert hectares into acres, and even if she could, she has no idea how many cows normally graze on an acre of land. “That sounds like a lot of cows,” she says.
“Major cities have five to fifteen thousand inhabitants per square kilometre,” he says drily.
She feels dumb until she remembers that one of his specialities is infectious diseases. He’ll have numbers like that on his fingertips in order to predict the spread of airborne diseases or the likelihood of a major epidemic. “So you’re saying it’s better to be a cow.”
“If you like your privacy, yes. But only if you’re a Comté cow. It’s no use being a Brie or an Emmenthaler cow.”
He pronounces ‘privacy’ with a short ‘i’, like in ‘sit’. Earlier, when he took a work-related call, he slipped back into a British accent; when he talks with her his accent is in-between — undefined, but un-American. She can’t remember noticing anything of the sort when he visited them in Philly, not even the first time he came. He’d slipped into his ‘American’ persona without any delay. Of course, they aren’t in the US now.
She brushes a few crumbs off her lap and says as casually as she can manage, “Can I ask you something?”
He cuts a slice out of one of the peaches and proffers it to her on the point of his Swiss knife. When she takes it he cuts the next slice. She takes that one too.
“Well?” she says.
“Perhaps,” he answers, cutting the third slice, a perfect wedge.
She observes him, the neat, precise movements, the dexterity with which he handles the knife. “Perhaps what?” Why do conversations with him have to be so strenuous?
“For every question you ask me, I get to ask you one,” he proposes.
Oh okay, a game. “Does the answer have to be the truth?” she asks.
“Yes. And that was your first question. It’s my turn.”
Wait, what happened there? She wanted to ask him … . But he’s asking his question already. “Your fairy godmother grants you one wish before you die. What do you choose?”
She pretends to think about it, her mood dampened, though in all honesty she isn’t surprised by the turn his question has taken. Wilson, the walking time bomb, at a conference on palliative oncology — can it get more morbid than that? She decides to turn his thoughts to lighter matters.
“A VIP ticket for a Bruce Springsteen concert. I had a huge crush on The Boss when I was, oh, sixteen, but I’ve never been to a concert.”
That earns her a strawberry directly from his long fingers. “Hmmm, good,” she says. She loves strawberries. “Have you thought about returning to the US?” And taking responsibility for Joel, she adds silently.
“Thought about it? Yes. Is it going to happen? No.”
“Why not?”
“If you want more specific answers, you’ll have to ask more specific questions. Would you sleep with Bruce Springsteen?”
Okay, that distraction worked too well. She considers which answer will shut him up quickest. “Yes.”
His eyes flash. “Yes?”
“Yes, I would,” she says defensively.
“He’s old.”
“He’s sexy.”
The tilt of his head indicates that he’ll allow for that. It’s her turn. She’d better get her question in before he’s side-tracked completely. What does she need to know? “Do you have a job?”
“Yep.”
Dare she push this? Before she can decide, he volunteers further information of his own accord. “There were a couple of mysterious deaths on the excavation team at an archaeological dig in Mesopotamia. I’d been dabbling in pathological forensics for the Metropolitan Police in London on a consultancy basis, so they sent me to look into the matter; none of the regulars wanted to go to Iraq. Turned out that one of the deaths was suicide and the other an undiagnosed case of Chagas caught when the guy was excavating in Guatemala years ago. So, no curse of the mummy, just a coincidence.” He leans forward and pops another strawberry directly into her mouth. “The suicide was the team’s only osteologist, so they’d put some students to work on the bones they’d found at the site. I took a look at those and re-sorted them — it wouldn’t have looked good if they’d unwittingly exhibited pictures of chimera on their websites. Next thing I knew, I was being asked about possible causes of death and dietary habits of their legit corpses, and from there it was a small step to Jack-of-all-trades at the site.”
“Jack-of-all-trades?” She doesn’t see him doing menial work for a bunch of academic hole diggers.
“All the odds and sods: piecing together artefacts, figuring out what they were used for, differentiating between objects of daily use and cult objects. … Those archaeology chaps aren’t exactly systematic. They come up with a theory and then bend the facts to fit it, instead of looking at the facts and deducing theories from them. And they are crap at three-dimensional puzzles. You wouldn’t believe the problems they have reassembling shards of pottery. I suspect it’s only done to keep the student volunteers busy and out of the way.” He shrugs indifferently.
“And you helped a bunch of students to put together old clay jars,” she says incredulously.
His smile is lazy. “One of the students was a D cup,” he says by way of explanation, “and I was stuck there anyway: the only bus out of there ran irregularly. Anyway, someone from a UN team investigating the ethnic cleansing carried out by ISIS two years ago dropped by the camp and looked at my work, and the net result was that I was offered a job in forensic archaeology.”
“What’ll you be doing?” she asks, though she has a dark inkling.
“Digging up mass graves in lovely places where one group of humans slaughtered another group of humans in the name of some -ism or other.”
“That sounds …” She wants to say, ‘exciting’, but the lie won’t pass her lips. “… disgusting!”
Pete reclines along the beam on which she has propped her feet so that his head is level with her knee. He looks up at her from that position. “You owe me two answers now,” he says.
“I don’t,” she swiftly retorts. “If you miss your turn it’s your problem.”
He idly picks up a grape and examines it. “Why are you here instead of supervising the move to your suburban arcadia?”
She sighs; she’d rather not think about the weeks ahead of her. “When I closed the deal with the owners four weeks ago, it looked like we’d be able to move within a month. There was no need to redecorate anything; the only major alteration was adjusting the bathroom to Rachel’s needs, so I planned the move for last weekend. But then the plumber damaged a water pipe in Rachel’s bathroom while lowering the washbasin to her height, so now the entire wall has to be re-tiled.”
“Rachel can cope with normal bathrooms,” he points out.
He’s right; she does it all the time at Louisa’s place.
“I can’t deal with moving into a new place and unpacking while the tilers hammer away in the bathroom and trail dust through the entire house. Do you have any idea how much of a mess knocking tiles off the walls makes? They’ve sealed off the bathroom, but the dust still pervades every corner of the house.”
“First world problems,” Pete drawls, spitting a peach stone at the thigh of a passing runner.
She slaps his head lightly with a rolled paper napkin. “It’s beyond irritating and it has messed up my schedule. The only good thing about the affair is that it gave me the time to come here.” She hesitates, biting her lip. “Are you going to tell Wilson about yourself and Joel before you leave?”
His eyelids, which have been drooping, fly open. “Are you kidding?”
“I take it that’s a no,” she says coolly.
He sits up again and twists around to face her. “The last time Wilson received bad news before he boarded a plane, it didn’t end well. Are you sure you want to escort him back to the States after he finds out that the squirt isn’t his?”
She slowly shakes her head. No, she doesn’t need Pete to drop his bomb and then take off, leaving her to mop up the mess. His mess, his problem.
“Time enough when I come next week,” Pete says.
“Oh, are you still coming then?”
“Sure,” he says easily. “The flight’s booked. What was I like at med school?” he asks next.
This is precisely what she doesn’t need: a trip down memory lane. Then again, med school is less tricky than their later association. She hadn’t known him well at Ann Arbor: she’d crushed on him, pursued him, and slept with him, but they’d never dated and they hadn’t spent much time with each other outside of class. In fact, her pursuit of him remains clearer in her memory than any personal interaction of that time, sex included. The fun lay in the chase, she supposes.
He’s waiting for an answer. “Brilliant and notorious,” she tells him.
“That’s just so … impersonal,” he drawls.
“I hardly knew you,” she says defensively.
“You remember everyone who ever crossed your path. You’ve got a filing system in your head where you sort people according to professional and personal relevance, with a grading system that reflects their future potential. So, what was I like in college?”
She has a sudden flash of memory of him sprawling in the endocrinology lecture hall, his arms and legs draped loosely over desk and chair, his hair — longer and curly then — in disarray, his eyes darting everywhere, his sensitive lips twitching in thought. No, there’s no way she’ll let him share her memories. They belong to her, not to him.
Three adjectives, she decides; it’s one of the exercises her therapist makes her do occasionally to describe her feelings. “Gawky. … Shy. Arrogant.” There, that should do.
“Isn’t that a contradiction: shy and arrogant?”
She doesn’t bother to answer that; he knows as well as she does that it isn’t. He just doesn’t like to hear himself described as anything but self-confident.
“‘Gawky’,” he meditates, “as in, ‘Gawd, what a cute hottie’?
It takes her a moment to parse his sentence. Then she grins. “You were kinda cute, I guess — once people got past your surly frown and supercilious sneer.”
He leans back again, his head resting against her knee, tempting her to circle the bald spot on the back of his head with her fingers. The sun is setting beyond the Seine, bathing him in pink light that softens the wrinkles and furrows, making him look younger, more innocent. Is he flirting with her? She feels confused and disoriented even though she’s had none of the wine, for by now jet lag is kicking in with a vengeance. She needs to get to a safe place, where old memories don’t mingle with new complications.
“Wilson should be done soon. Shouldn’t we get back to the hotel?”
He looks up, smiling knowingly; her confusion hasn’t escaped his notice. She breaks their eye contact, busying herself with packing up their picnic. He takes the backpack from her when everything is packed, then holds out his hand to pull her to her feet. When she’s standing he doesn’t release her hand; instead, he interlaces his fingers with hers.
She hesitates. She could (and probably should) pull her hand free, but maybe she’s reading too much into this. Maybe he’s flirting with her, but what’s wrong with that? They’ve spent a wonderful day together, and she has no desire to ruin their accord by reading more into his actions than they mean. If he’s just trying to give her a good time by treating this like a date instead of what it really is — she strongly suspects that Wilson guilted him into staying another day so that she wouldn’t have to spend it by herself — then she’d be churlish if she showed mistrust.
Or so she tells herself.
They saunter back the way they came, not talking much. She’s too aware of his proximity to make casual small talk, which isn’t her strongest point anyway. After a few futile, stilted attempts she gives up and decides to enjoy the moment. Carpe diem, and all that. After all, it’s her first visit to Paris, it’s a lovely summer evening, and the man beside her has organised an enjoyable day out for her. What’s not to like? So she resolutely shushes the part of her brain that’s trying to tell her that this is too good to last (she’s good at that), relaxes (she’s not quite so good at that), and allows herself to pretend that she’s on a date with a charming stranger.
When they get back to the conference hotel the participants are already streaming out of the lobby onto the street. Wilson is outside, pacing up and down. When he spots them he hurries towards them, stopping short when he catches sight of their clasped hands. Cuddy self-consciously pulls her hand free — did she imagine it or did Pete just try to retain her hand in his? — and steps up to Wilson to hug him. His embrace is warm and tight, as though he’s been worried about her. His gaze when he releases her is quizzical, examining. She smiles reassuringly, not quite sure what the issue is. Does he think Pete may have persuaded her to drink AMA? She’s not that stupid.
Wilson turns to Pete, who is observing them with a mocking gleam. “When’s your flight?”
Pete shrugs. “No rush.”
“I’m taking Lisa out to dinner,” Wilson says challengingly.
Something’s definitely off here, Cuddy decides. All of a sudden there’s too much testosterone in the air. She hasn’t seen the two men staring each other down since … oh, probably since the last time House stole Wilson’s prescription pad to get at Vicodin. It’s not a Good Memory, so she hurriedly pushes it back into the box out of which it just popped, hoping to retrieve the atmosphere of careless bonhomie. If Pete has been jerking Wilson’s chain, she’s sure she’ll hear about it the next two days.
“Umm, we’ve eaten already,” she says. “I’m sorry; if I’d known, I’d have —”
“Oh, it’s no problem,” Wilson says. “I haven’t booked anything.”
“How was your talk?” she asks belatedly.
He tugs a hand through his hair. “Fine,” he says. “It went really —”
“I’ll take off then,” Pete interrupts him brusquely.
Cuddy stares. What the hell is going on here?
“I’ll see you next week,” he says to Wilson.
Then he turns to Cuddy, moving a step closer, which brings him right back into her personal space. He frowns down at her, as though weighing something in his mind. Maybe he fears that she expects him to hug her after their day out, what with them holding hands and so on, but really, she knows how he feels about that. So she gives him a tight little smile, and then breaks eye contact, taking half a step back — only to be held back by a hand in the small of her back. His other hand comes to rest on her hip. Her skin under her thin sweater prickles; she can feel a tingling running up her back to her scalp and her abs tightening in an automatic reaction that she’s sure he can sense under his fingers. She swiftly gazes up at him, only to find that his face is already too close to hers for her to focus properly on his features. And then his lips brush hers.
She doesn’t know how to react. It isn’t that she minds — far from it. But how is she supposed to react? What … this isn’t … does he …? Her thoughts lose all coherence. She has two seconds to think of an adequate reaction — and those two seconds are long over. She closes her eyes and takes a steadying breath: she’ll step out of his embrace and pretend this never happened. But then his lips are on hers again, this time not brushing them, but pushing insistently. She should …
Oh, well. There’s no way she’s pushing him away, so instead she relents, allowing him to deepen the kiss. This feels … good, and not just physically: for the first time in, oh, two years she doesn’t feel rejected. She gets why Pete avoided contact with her, both physical and emotional, ever since finding out that he is Gregory House, but at times it felt as though she was being punished for who he was. So she allows herself to enjoy the comfort of his embrace and the stealthy warmth of his kiss, her hands moving up his shirt and over his shoulders around his neck.
A passer-by makes a joking comment that pulls her out of — whatever this is. She surfaces, her brain reconnecting with her surroundings. Pete breaks the kiss and pulls back slightly without relinquishing his hold, looking down at her with an amused, quizzical expression. Then he raises his glance over her head, his smile morphing into a full-fledged grin, his eyes darkly jubilant. She twists around in his arm, wondering what the reason for his impish amusement might be.
It’s Wilson, staring at them flabbergasted. Oh dear, he must be thinking she has lost her head completely — and he isn’t all that wrong! Cuddy can feel herself flushing guiltily, and that annoys her. Yes, she’s being stupid and naive and God knows what else, but heaven knows Wilson has made his share of mistakes. But she isn’t the one who Wilson is regarding with a look of reproach; he’s glaring at Pete. Her gaze flickers to and fro between the men: Pete is grinning provocatively while his tongue probes the corners of his mouth, while Wilson throws his hands up in the air.
“Okay,” he says to no one in particular, half turning away from them as he brings his hands down in a parallel chopping motion. “Okay. I … oh, never mind!” He twists sharply on his heel and disappears inside the hotel.
Pete’s hands finally drop off her hips; she resents that she instantly misses the comfort of his hands. She turns back to him. “What was that about?”
He’s still staring at the revolving door through which Wilson just departed. Then he twitches his head sideways in a gesture of approval, his grin ebbing into a satisfied smile. “Nothing,” he says. “I just proved a point.”
That doesn’t sound good. “Do I … want to know?”
He looks down at her again. “No,” he says, “I don’t think you do.” With that he flicks her cheek casually with his index finger before he, too, departs without another word.
She is left alone on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, wondering what just happened.
| Chapter Index |
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no subject
Date: 2015-08-23 02:57 pm (UTC)Oh my god, this was delicious. What a pleasure! I'm not too coherent right now. It was all so good and well-written. I was sort of surprised that Cuddy didn't think that popping strawberries into her mouth wasn't erotic flirting, or maybe she was ignoring the implications.
Other than that, you have to keep writing or...
no subject
Date: 2015-08-23 08:26 pm (UTC)I was sort of surprised that Cuddy didn't think that popping strawberries into her mouth wasn't erotic flirting, or maybe she was ignoring the implications.
I think it's a case of not wanting to admit to herself what's going on, because if she did, she'd feel obliged to put a stop to it or at least clarify the situation, and we all know what happens when Cuddy tries to get House to admit that he's flirting with her.
Thanks for commenting.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-24 10:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-24 11:58 am (UTC)Hey, he's doing everyone a favour. You don't appreciate his awesome nobility :) [It's a good thing that he doesn't hesitate to point this out, otherwise you (and Wilson) would never have noticed, I figure.]
Wilson was a bit presumptuous with his whole scheme of marrying Cuddy so she could take care of his kid if he dies
Oh noes! You forget that we're not talking about some dumb, 'normal' kid. We're talking about House's cerulean-eyed genius son — even if Wilson doesn't know it! So, Cuddy would absolutely jump at the chance of getting such an adorable, heart-melting bundle of joy — as House/Pete well knows :)
Yes, Julia has a very good point. She's the voice of sanity in all this madness. Too bad no one ever listens to her.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-24 11:19 pm (UTC)It's interesting to read how Pete behaves on a date with Cuddy, and vice-versa. It's very different from S7, but of course these characters have changed a lot since then because of everything that's happened. Nice irony that it all works so much better now.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-25 12:24 pm (UTC)I think if you're looking for a canon parallel, you're better off looking at how House behaves with Nora in S6 (The Down Low?) or possibly with Stacy in Hunting, when he does the dishes for her. Or even in S3 when he's looking at apartments with Bonnie, sounding her on Wilson. This isn't House trying to ensure that his 'drug' supply doesn't run dry (that's my personal take on his interactions with Cuddy in S7), this is 'House with an agenda', whatever that might be. (The Nora parallel works best, I think.)
Nice irony that it all works so much better now.
It ... does? We'll see ...
Thanks for reading and leaving a comment.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-25 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-26 05:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-28 04:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-30 05:34 pm (UTC)Yes. IMO she isn't dumb, but she simply isn't mentally agile enough to keep up with the other two. She's like the younger sister who tags along, but isn't really allowed to play and doesn't quite understand the rules. Thanks for reading!