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I am leaving in the morning so please don't be shy
by leiascully
Cuddy is sitting on the kitchen island watching Stacy slice beets for a salad when Stacy stiffens, puts down the knife, and turns around.
"I'm leaving."
"Now?" Cuddy says, her mind still on the cake in the oven. Stacy can cook well when she wants to, and she's gone all out for this anniversary dinner. The cake is Cuddy's grandmother's recipe; she gave it willingly when Stacy asked, trying to offer something to celebrate her gladness over House still being alive, over the two of them still being together. It's been a long year and a half. Stacy is standing in front of her and Cuddy wants to think about the cake, but the word is lodged in her ear. Leaving.
"Tomorrow," Stacy says, looking at Cuddy almost pleadingly, her hands covered in beet juice. "I'm leaving tomorrow. I got a job at a firm in Manhattan."
"That's not so far," Cuddy says. "Are you two moving or are you going to commute? House didn't say anything."
"Greg doesn't know," Stacy says, and her eyes are so brown, and Cuddy thinks, oh. "I rented a little furnished place," Stacy goes on, in a hurry as if that will make the words sound better. I'll come back on the weekends."
"Why are you telling me this?" Cuddy asks, and thinks about sliding off the kitchen island to check the cake, but if she opens the oven too soon, the thing will go flat, so she stays where she is.
"No more Wednesday tennis," Stacy offers weakly. "I...I couldn't tell James and I couldn't think of anyone else." She rinses her hands in the sink and comes closer to Cuddy, who is numb and wants to lean away, but doesn't. Stacy, who always looks so put together that even Cuddy is jealous, looks little-girl-lost and her fingers are trembling. So Cuddy lets her when Stacy puts damp, chilly fingers around the back of her neck and draws her head forward, even though Cuddy has never thought about anything like this, kissing women, kissing Stacy.
Stacy kisses her tentatively at first, nothing like the day-to-day brash Stacy that Cuddy knows. Cuddy kisses her back, more from instinct than anything else, and then it gets interesting, because Stacy becomes more Stacy and her mouth gets more insistent, though there's still a question in the way her lips move, a question in the way she starts to whimper and knead Cuddy's neck.
"Lisa," Stacy says pleadingly, and her other hand is on Cuddy's thigh up under her skirt, and Cuddy doesn't pull away the way she always thought she would, if anything like this happened. It's Stacy, her best girl friend, and neither of them has anyone else to be women with, and maybe this is a logical end. It is an end of some kind: Cuddy already knows that the weekends won't matter, that Stacy is leaving, and that she's leaving the shambles of five years and a broken House behind her. It is a sad attempt at penance on Stacy's part, seducing her lover's boss, but Cuddy understands in some roundabout way. None of them have ever been good at apologies.
Stacy's hand slides up and up her thigh and Cuddy is tingling. Stacy's fingers slide under the elastic of Cuddy's panties and before she understands how, Cuddy is looking at her own underthings on the floor. She wonders if Stacy's done this before. She wonders if that's how Stacy kept House's interest for so long, but then Stacy is kissing her collarbones inside the open curve of her shirt, and Stacy's breasts are just in the right place to fall into the cups of Cuddy's palms. Stacy's palm slips back around Cuddy's neck to her cheek and then Stacy's kissing her mouth again, and Cuddy has Stacy's tongue and Stacy's thumb in her mouth.
The kitchen smells like hot sugar and butter and Stacy's thumb tastes a little sweet, like beets. Cuddy is leaning back, not to get away but to make Stacy press against her as Cuddy opens her thighs and Stacy's fingers slip between her legs. The arch of the faucet presses into the arched small of Cuddy's back and she's gasping around Stacy's thumb. Stacy's mouth has closed over her breast through the shirt, leaving a hot wet mark when she changes to the other one, and her red-stained fingers are pressing and rubbing between Cuddy's thighs and Cuddy's going up like the gas flame of the stove, her pleasure popping and sizzling like butter and her inhibitions and her body melting. Her head is tipping back against the force of the flush spreading up her chest and throat when she catches a whiff of burning sugar.
"The cake," she gasps and Stacy drags mouth and fingers away, shoves her hand into an oven mitt, and rescues the cake. It should be burned, Cuddy thinks, it should be charred on top or stuck to the sides or something, but it looks perfect. Life doesn't care if Stacy is fucking her in the middle of the kitchen. The cake isn't affected by the infidelity, by the leaving, by the way that House is going to be broken.
Cuddy knows she should stop now. She should find her panties where she thinks Stacy kicked them under the kitchen island. She should pull down her skirt and put on a sweater to hide the marks of desire, though it's too hot for a sweater, and she should take her hot cheeks and the shreds of her dignity and go home to a cold shower. She should call House and tell him, some warning to cushion the blow.
"Will you stay?" Stacy says nervously, roses on her cheekbones, wringing her guilty red hands, and Cuddy can smell her own arousal on Stacy's palms from here. House won't be home for hours.
"Yes," she says, and she doesn't mean to, but it doesn't occur to her to take it back until she's in the bed, their bed, House and Stacy's, and Stacy's stained fingers are inside her again and a vibrator has appeared from somewhere and the buzz of it shakes up her thoughts until they're fragmented and jumbled. These are Stacy's fingers that have touched House everywhere. This is Stacy's mouth which has kissed House's mouth, which has held House's cock. Cuddy isn't sure whether that should be a turn on or not but there's no denying that it's hot in the bed, she's rumpling the sheets like the wanton girls she almost envied in college, she's moaning in keys she'd forgotten existed, she's moving her knee between Stacy's thighs in an attempt to give something back and Stacy's moaning too. God, Cuddy thinks, and "God" she says, and Stacy twists those guilty fingers and hits the right spot and Cuddy says, "Aaah!" and the ceiling dissolves.
She falls asleep, surprising herself. When she gets up, dressing herself quickly in her wrinkled clothes, Stacy is in the kitchen again, turning the perfect cake out of its pan. She turns and gives Cuddy a tight little smile.
"I didn't mean to fall asleep," Cuddy says, "I didn't mean to...I would have tried to make things reciprocal."
"It's fine," Stacy says, and frosts the cake. The frosting is made from Cuddy's grandmother's recipe too. Cuddy leans against the doorframe, wondering how she came to have such a stake in these people's lives, and watches the tendons flex in Stacy's wrist as she frosts, Stacy's dark hair falling across her face and her fingertips still pink.
She leaves Stacy there, trying to get the bitterness out of her mouth with a fingertip full of frosting.
+ + + +
Three days later House calls her. He's drunk and she shouldn't go to him, but she owes him, and she shivers imagining she can still feel the print of Stacy's fingers inside her, imagining the streaks of beet juice left on her thighs.
When she gets there, he's not actually drunk, but he's sitting in the dark.
"She's gone," he says, and flicks on a lamp.
"I know," she says.
"You knew," he says, and she bows her head and says nothing.
For a moment there is silence there in the dark of the apartment. "You knew and you didn't tell me," he says evenly. "And you fucked her."
Her head snaps up so fast it makes her spine arch and for a moment she feels the faucet pressing into her back again. He holds up her panties and she blushes hot. Between her thighs there is a sudden slickness and heat. She holds out her hand but he tucks the scrap of fabric into a pocket.
"Why?" he asks.
"She was upset," Cuddy fumbles for an answer. "It was a one-time thing, House, we didn't plan it, she just kissed me and I kissed her back and it was breaking her heart." She is babbling. She never babbles. She shuts her mouth.
"Why her and not me? When it comes to broken hearts," he says conversationally, "I think I fucking win. Broken heart. Broken leg. Broken is my fucking middle name, if you're into that kind of thing. Which I didn't think you were."
"I..." she says. "Do you want me to leave?"
"I called you," he says. "Not Wilson. Although which of the two of you is more likely to give me a sympathy shag is a tossup at the moment, apparently."
"You're not being fair," she says.
"Life's not fair," he says, and she thinks about the perfect cake, about tradition and love and leaving. She steps closer.
"What do you want from me, House?" she asks, taking off her light jacket and leaving it over a chair, stepping out of her shoes. "Do you want me to fuck you? Do you want me to tell you what Stacy and I did? Will that make life better? Will it make her come back? It wasn't magic. It was sex. I'm not proud of it. I won't be any prouder if I sleep with you. I can't help you." She unbuttons her shirt anyway, because she's lying: she'll offer him any comfort she thinks he'll take, but it has to feel meaningless, he has to be able to save face saying it meant nothing. She unzips her skirt, undresses him, lets him pull off her panties and leaves her bra on. She kisses him, her mouth that kissed Stacy's, his mouth that kissed Stacy's. He touches her thighs and she wonders briefly if that's how his fingers felt splayed over Stacy's skin. She wonders if he's wondering how Stacy touched her, where and how. There are three of them in this coupling.
She straddles his lap. He handles her breasts, a little roughly, and she hisses through her teeth and puts up with it. She rises over him. He pushes into her. She twists herself down until she can feel his thighs under hers, rises and falls, rises and falls. The pressure and texture of him inside her is nothing like Stacy's fingers. She welcomes it.
"This is not a pity fuck," she says at some point, dizzy with pleasure, listening to him groan and hiss. "This matters."
"I know," he says, and kisses her to stop her saying anything else. She runs her hands up and down his ribs, touches his chest, tries to make him feel cherished. You matter, she tries to say with her fingers, though she was never good at sign language. We matter. She touches his right arm, with the larger muscles: he's been using the cane for a year and a half now, and it shows in the way the muscles cord along the bones of arm and shoulder. She kisses his shoulder, she kisses his neck and his ear, and he holds her hip and fucks her stupid on his leather couch in the apartment he and Stacy got together.
When she comes, it feels like slamming into a wall covered in sandpaper, all her skin rubbed off and her bones there for House to see. When he comes, he just groans, nobody's name, but his hand is tangled in her hair and his eyes are open: he knows who it is. She looks back at him, steadily, breathing fast and her skin flushed and sweaty. Blue eyes and blue eyes, she thinks, and it does mean anything, but it feels like it does.
She leaves like a slow-motion rewind of coming in: putting her clothes back on, stepping back into her shoes, retrieving jacket, opening door. He is dozing on the couch in the heap of his clothes, looking lean but not vulnerable somehow in his nakedness. The scar is a shadow on his thigh, a place the light can't touch. She feels the prints of his fingers on her hips. She is a marked woman, the beet-red of guilt, the bruising of love that will never be.
"I liked the cake," he says as she steps through the door, and she closes her eyes for a moment and walks into the night.
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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