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Dancers - Chapter 1
by menme
Chapter 1 (The Study of Clouds)
G.
...and it was up and out, ignore the pain, every day hemorrhaging into the next, soon there'd be no blood left in it at all. He had cases, variously interesting and numbing, and then he didn't have cases, the ducklings following him around anyway like - well, like ducklings, quacking about his ethics one day, his non-existent bedside manner the next. It was all gray at the edges, so add flat affect to his mental whiteboard of himself, his body running around doing things without any thought or control behind it, that was ataxia. Write that down. He was collecting quite a list.
And every two or three days that little ray of sunshine (he was beginning to time it right, she came out her apartment door next to his around 8:12), twenty-something, emphasis on the something, and hot - cute curling brown hair to her shoulders, no chest to speak of, but god that ass. If he timed it so he was waiting to ride the elevator down, he often got a Morning!, sweet sunshine smile, and he could watch that fabulous ass (eschewing the elevator, and why shouldn't she?) until it rounded the corner out of view down the next flight of stairs. Made his day every time.
And depressed the hell out of him. Because watching that sweet little bottom disappear all he could ever think was, You're never getting anything like that in this life unless you pay for it.
****
Depressed the hell out of him. Even arguing with Cuddy he couldn't stop thinking about her. The thought being: why should his days have come to depend so much on whether he spent two seconds in the morning with someone he didn't know? It just meant his life sucked, worse than he'd been admitting to himself.
"House, are you even listening? Do that to the patient and they will put you in jail, trust me. And this time I'll let you rot there. In fact, I'll enjoy it." Cuddy's face superimposed over his daydream of gorgeous Miss X made his leg hurt. Cud had more up front, but he was never going to get a Morning! like that from his boss, and wouldn't have wanted to, for chrissake was that ever a disgusting thought! What case was she even talking about? He was losing it fast.
"Come to think of it, I might just bring a bottle of champagne to the prison so I can open it and celebrate while I watch you through the bars."
"Promise to wear the red blouse for me when you do. You know, the low-cut one." He leaned in confidentially. "I'll want to get something out of it too."
Actually Miss X had a name. He'd seen her down at the end of the mailboxes, and assuming she wasn't Harvey Kowalski her name was Danielle Sieger. Did her friends call her Dani?
Stop it, you fool.
"Jail, House!"
"Uuuh - Rock. Elvis? Sorry, I thought we were doing word association."
"You aren't listening, are you?"
"And you ain't nothing but a hound dog."
****
Then came the day. Instead of hurrying down the stairs, she was waiting beside him at the elevator and then she was riding down beside him and he couldn't think of one single thing to say. Maybe something about going down together? More than anything in the world except maybe his leg, he hated being left speechless. If a Morning! could make his day, a conversation would probably hold him for a week. He tried to keep his eyes front. If he looked at her he might whine like a puppy. No chest at all, really. Pre-prepubescent.
"Say, aren't you the one always bounding up and down the stairs? What are you doing taking the elevator?" (Out of nowhere, that one. Very dumb. He could have kicked himself. Well, actually he couldn't have).
"I hurt my ankle at work yesterday."
"And...what is it you do?"
"I'm a professional dancer."
Then he did turn to her, let his gaze journey up and down her, tell me where, I'll be front and center this evening. Was that a blush? No, she was looking straight at him. "Not the euphemistic kind. The real kind. You know, modern interpretive. I'm with a dance theater in the city." The elevator landed with a thud.
Verbal diarrhea caught up with him. "Damn, not a stripper after all. I was about to say, you ought to check the warranty on that boob job." (You total idiot.)
Those amazing eyes went very, very cold. She reached the front door ahead of him and turned with a smile. "You have a nice day too." And let the door slam to in his face.
****
Cuddy made good on her promise. All except the champagne. They took his Vicodin away. Jailors - didn't know pity from Adam, though he tried to explain it to them when the shakes started. But he was already too far gone by then to be coherent, or to be coherent enough to impress it upon the idiots that he was dying, goddammit, that it was a form of torture, little explosions behind his eyes, the bars of his cage moireing (for that was what it was, a cage for that strange animal they couldn't accept, the one that frightened them so for being true to its nature - was sophomoric philosophizing a symptom of the withdrawal?), loud talk from his three cellmates like a hammer to the head, his leg grown ten times its size as the day became a night, a yawning black hole of pain he might fold himself into, vanishing down the rabbit-hole forever....
Cameron coming in around two. The moth drawn to his vulnerability. He didn't hear a word she said. Left her and slid down the hole....
At six a.m. Cuddy relented and posted bail. Or someone - probably Wilson, the god of friendship bless him - had talked her into relenting. The bottle, still there in the things they returned to him. Five minutes for the first one to kick in. Christ, it was better than sex. And with all the paperwork, it was eight before he stood in front of his own door, fumbling for the key.
"Just getting off work?"
He looked like shit on a stick, had to after a night like that. Couldn't she have overslept just once? "Actually I spent the night in jail." Ah, he had managed to shock her. Always good.
Her gorgeous eyes were large, searching. "Is there...anything I can do?"
"You can let me get inside here and go to bed."
"I mean, my brother-in-law's this high-powered lawyer."
"The hospital has high-powered lawyers."
"What...did you do?"
She was looking straight at him again. Unflinching.
"I disobeyed a court order to kill someone."
"You mean, pull the plug? They put you in jail for that?"
"The relatives wanted to go with kidnapping charges too. Would have made it worse, I suppose." Her eyes grew even larger. "I - uh - wheeled this coma patient, machines and all, to a disused part of the hospital while no one was looking, and refused to tell them where. Cool, huh? I was hoping to gain an hour or so because I knew I could have cured him once the test came back." Unflinching. "Except they found him too fast."
"Then they...?"
"Oh, he's dead now. Disconnected, disengaged, taken offline. Pick your metaphor. I'm - uh - really tired." He gestured at his door.
She turned to the elevator and he couldn't help himself. "That ankle still hurt? It was three days ago."
"It's still swollen."
"Shouldn't be. Knock on my door when you get back. Um, not unless it's been at least six hours." And mumbling: "I need my beauty sleep."
****
D.
She'd done it before, but never with a man so patently unsuited to her. She looked down at his hair, curly brown, the same color as hers, and she wanted to touch it.
When obsession crept up on her, she had always managed to find release before, throwing herself into the dancing, flying through performances to keep herself from thinking, or just sleeping with the guy. Three times in the past year, she had gone to bed with a man and woken up with a boy. It was always fast and sweet and ultimately, saddeningly, boring.
This was different. It had crept up so slowly she could no longer say when it had started. Seeing him there at the elevator for the hundredth time (she had learned to wait for the sound of his door opening before slipping out her own), standing straight and yet crooked in some way that had nothing to do with the cane. The tiny smile whenever she said hello, quickly reined back in as though smiling were a tic he wanted no one to see.
The eyes, hard as blue ice, melting to vulnerability at the edges.
"The bruising actually got worse the second day." She sat on his sofa, her foot on his coffee table. He sat on the floor between the two and felt her ankle. Again, she imagined her hand reaching out to stroke his hair. "It moved down into my foot. Is that bad?" His touch, so matter-of-fact, left her warm. And it hurt. She suspected he was being rougher than he had to.
"Means you're going to die. Oh, don't look like that! I'm joking. It's a highly prevalent condition called gravity. The blood from the bruising seeking the path of least resistance. All it means is you've been on it more than you should have. Don't they teach you dancers how to handle sprains?"
"We're opening something new soon. I can't miss rehearsals."
He shrugged. "No limit to stupidity."
"Ow, why did you pinch me?"
"No numbness in the toes? Actually I wanted to make sure you hadn't gone to sleep. Most people at least groan a little at this point. Isn't my palpating this hurting you?"
Time to go out on a limb. "I'm pretending it doesn't to impress you."
For a moment his face was averted from her. "Ah, the many who have floundered on that rocky shore." He stood and she could see how much of a struggle the leg made it. "Should have moaned and groaned. It would have got me hotter." She glanced up quickly but he was gazing down at her ankle again. "Compress it at night, not too tight. Cool if you've overworked it. But the best thing would be, Stay off it. Of course, you won't take my advice."
"If I did, who would carry me back to my apartment?"
He looked at her then. Really seeing her, she told herself. The light in the eyes had changed, from hard to...knowing. Looking at her too long. She willed herself not to blush. "I can lend you a cane." The moment was gone. "Considering you - what - danced on it for days I suspect you can make it back to your apartment without me." What if I don't want to without you?
At the door, last chance, she managed to match his sarcasm. "Thanks, doc. I'm low on cash, but I'll bake you some cookies some time."
"Right."
Back in her apartment she watched the rain run down the window. It was all about that personality, some exudation, like a storm, little flashes of lightning, all washing over her whenever she was near him, a deep drumming rhythm of the rain inside him. She wondered what he was crying about in there. Not a good obsession if she was drawn by his weakness. Yet it wasn't that.
The abrasiveness hadn't bothered her from the start. It attracted her when it shouldn't have. Just as quantum particles had opposites that didn't exist in the real world, his rudeness - in the wacky universe inside her head - became a charisma, a kind of non-charm neither repellant nor attractive but diametrical to both. She knew he was throwing up walls, hiding something inside, and she loved the sheer amount of effort he put into it. The ruder he got the more endearing it seemed. If that made her odd, so be it.
She knew she should start hardening herself. He was gay, or he had a girlfriend, someone elegant and older than her, who power-dressed (okay, maybe not, or she would dress him better). He had as much as told her he wasn't interested. Stay off it.
She hugged herself and watched the rain.
****
G.
Another case, obese woman, forty-three, some kind of symptoms, but he couldn't concentrate even though he'd just written them down. His notes on the whiteboard actually wobbled, his shot brain presenting as a first-grader's handwriting, and he knew they noticed.
"Differential diagnosis, people."
Chase looked disgusted. "The woman has one symptom. No feeling in the extremities. We can't -"
"Heavy metal poisoning," Cameron tossed in.
"You know, Cuddy told you she was going to do that." Foreman couldn't drop it, like a diamond-bit drill boring into his head, a twenty-carat headache, anything to do with jail really gets to the guy with the record. "In my opinion, you deserved a night in jail."
"Look, it's a little game Cuddy and I play, okay? If you want in on it - No, wait, it's a grown-ups' game."
"So it's a game. You're never going to beat her. She's too good at defense. I can't wait for her next move, to tell you the truth. She knows how to operate on you. You're in a battle of wills with her. It's eat or be eaten."
"And either one is fine with me." It picked him up a little to hear Cameron's moan. "Arsenic."
"What?"
"Hubby's putting rat poison in the patient's Jenny Craig shakes."
General snorts of disbelief. If he had a buck for every time. Chase was shaking his head. "You always do think the best of people, don't you?"
"Have you seen the patient, Dr. Chase?"
"I have, but I didn't think you had."
"Couldn't have missed her, could I? She's - what? - three hundred pounds?"
Cameron bit her lip. "And that naturally means her husband's trying to kill her."
"No, it naturally means she's very fat. Just do the test."
They left. He picked up his cane. "Just you and me, doll," he told it and turned on the TV. General Hospital. Just his drug. Lithe young bodies pretending to heal the world while they screwed each other with their eyes across an operating table. One of them looked like Dani.
****
That night she threw a party. Party being mild; try riot. Earthquake. He sat alone in his apartment and watched the walls bulge. Cranked the TV up to wuthering heights, tickled the ivories, just trying to join in the fun of hearing loss here, people, but no message was getting across that sound barrier. A tentacle of noise extruded into the hall, her door opening, probably another guest arriving - that would be about the fiftieth. They had to be standing in the bathtub by now.
And then the knock on his door.
She was flushed, and concealing something behind her back. Face like a pink light. It made the hall brighter. Eyes fiery (and he could tell himself it was all for him, couldn't he, like he'd convinced himself she'd been coming on to him with that ankle thing - but who was he fooling?)
"I just wanted to let you know I'm celebrating my birthday."
"You don't have to apologize. I was planning to go deaf someday. Might as well be now."
"I was going to ask if you'd...like to join us."
A tentacle of the guests themselves, two men and a woman, wrapped itself around her doorjamb, probably wondering where the life of the party had got to. The woman's gaze strafed him. She had obviously been self-medicating. "Some guy with a cane," the woman tossed back into the apartment. The tentacle withdrew.
He saw that she had heard it too. "No, thanks," he told her. "I have to stay home and polish my cane."
"I thought you'd say that. Well, not exactly that. So -" She produced from behind her back a full champagne flute. "Give the glass back sometime. It's the only one that's not chipped."
"I'm honored."
She turned to go and damn if it wasn't as if someone had dimmed the lights. "Have a good one," he told her. "Really."
"Thanks."
Canes can come in handy, he wanted to tell her. Why, just today. He couldn't get that out of his mind either, while he sat for the next two hours and listened to the party ebb until it was only an odd occasional banging against the nearest wall. Another bang and he was back in the clinic that afternoon, the black woman with her daughter, eleven maybe. Well-dressed, both of them. Bad teeth.
"She doesn't have all her immunizations."
"We get these. She will go to school here."
"Exactly why is it you want this certification to keep her out of P.E.?" Instinct was firing warning flares, but he could be wrong. It was the accent. Some kind of pidgin.
"She is very thin. Thin bones. We think it is not healthy."
"We being - you and your husband?"
"My husband is working for the United Nations."
"How long have you been in the States?"
"Three month."
"From -"
"Sierra Leone."
No more warning flares. That was an explosion. Stay casual. "Onset of menses?" Blank looks. Work on the kid. "Have you had a period, honey?" A nod. Leaning in now. Tensed. Watch their faces. "Is that when Mommy tied you down and cut your pee-pee?"
Mommy could move fast when she needed to. They might have made it out the door if he hadn't slammed it with his cane. The mother started shouting at the same time he did, but he was louder.
"You didn't want her in P.E. because she'd have had to undress in front of the others!"
"It is not your business!"
"Female circumcision is abuse!"
"It was made before we come here. It did not happen on your shore, so it is not a crime!"
"But I bet she's got a little sister." He spun on the girl. She clung to her mother, her eyes wide as night, oh yes we love our parents no matter what they do to us. "You want your sister to go through the same thing you did? You were lucky. You didn't die of sepsis. Sis may not be that lucky when her big day comes." He managed to get to the phone. "Get security in here." Cuddy was going to love this. "And Dr. Cuddy, for insecurity."
That was when the woman attacked him.
Bang, went the apartment wall next to him. Muted voices. He could have gotten creative with his cane on the mother, but there had stood her little girl, watching mommy claw the bad man, sobbing in her little-girl voice that it hadn't hurt at all, she'd gotten a lot of new clothes. Once security peeled his attacker off him and led her away, Cuddy asked him to examine the girl and they had had to hold her down while she screamed for her mother as if it were the doctors who were her torturers. Full clidoridectomy, all of the clitoris gone and some of the labia. He'd thought he was going to be sick. He could cut open dead babies without blinking an eye...but this, jesus. The wound had healed improperly, probably from bad sutures made when the clitoral artery hemorrhaged, causing the skin to fuse and narrowing the opening. Kid would never have sex without pain. When his shaking got too bad, he left the rest to Cuddy, who stared at him in disbelief as he hobbled out, found an empty lounge where he hung over a waste basket, barely stopping himself from yelling new york into it, until the nausea passed. What was it about that kind of mutilation that got to him? Go off and cut away any chance a person had to ever feel sexual pleasure. Like excising the soul.
Bang. And boy was he stupid not to have recognized those sounds. Meant she was down to her last guest, that was all. The lucky guy, probably with dancer's thighs and an ass of steel, who got to stay and screw her. He'd leave, take the bike for a midnight spin, before he would sit there and listen to that. Yet the banging was too irregular - didn't dancers have rhythm? - the voices angry. And getting angrier. Christ he was even stupider than he'd thought, that was a scream now and why did violence have to sound like sex -
- he was up and down the hall before he could think, cane's a handy thing for pounding on doors, yell a little - if he was louder than the shit who was beating her up it might scare him enough to make him open the door -
The door flew open. Big and redheaded, linebacker arms. Fists clenched. "Who are you?"
"Some guy with a cane. I've called the police." He waved the cordless phone in his hand, forcing himself not to stare at it in surprise. He didn't remember having picked it up.
"The hell you have." Yet the guy's eyes narrowed. Ruminating on whether he could afford another footnote to his rapsheet.
"Wanna take that risk, big guy?"
As the door slammed he managed to get the cane and his bum leg in. The pain knocked the breath out of him, but one more squeeze and he was inside. As if called for by some complicated dance they switched places (no, more like animals circling), Mr. Date-Rape suddenly on the outside looking in, jacket flung over his arm. He gave the phone one more glance, sneered a "Screw you, grandpa," and fled.
She was leaning against the bedroom door, her face averted, peach robe half off one shoulder. She pulled it up. The silence grew until it was ludicrous. She wasn't turning for a reason. If the bastard had hit her in the face, he would chase after him, even if the guy had already made it down to the street, and then he would - what ?
"Turn around and look at me."
"I'm grateful to you, but I can take care of myself."
"I truly believe you can. But you didn't."
She turned then. No visible marks. Not even tears. "I guess I was sending him the wrong signals."
"The blame is yours to take. Always the woman's fault, in my experience." Rein it in, damn it. "If he punched you in the stomach, you could have a bruised liver."
"It wasn't like that. He wasn't going there. He...threw me up against the wall a few times. I'll have one major headache."
"You have to get on a stage and dance with this guy tomorrow?"
"He's not a colleague. Just a friend of a friend. Okay, as of now, an enemy of an enemy." Something in her eyes, even from across the room, told him he might never get past this new wall. Shame was a strong deterrent. "Did you really call the police?" She looked at the phone in his hand. "Maybe you should uncall them."
"Uh, no. Did forget to bring your glass back, though." More silence. He turned to leave.
"What were you going to do? Beat him up with your cane?"
Though he pretended otherwise to most people, he rarely experienced true mockery. He couldn't have been more shocked if she had attacked him like the African woman. She was actually biting her lip. Presumably choking back a good laugh.
"Yeah," he told her. "I'm not too bad at it. I've had a lot pf practice on my boss. A couple of patients." End this. "See you around."
He made it out the door.
Violence clogged his dreams. He chased a little black girl down the highway, the virus she harbored would kill everyone, yet when he held her struggling in his arms she was white and had curling brown hair. Let go, he screamed, she was too tiny to be that strong, wouldn't let him move, and the Mack truck hit them both. It smeared him between steel and the concrete barrier and he didn't feel a thing. He thought, this is what's it's like to be a blood clot. It was infarction from the inside. Nothing could get through.
****
D.
He had looked so wild and beautiful shoving his way in, brandishing nothing but a phone and a wooden stick, that some deeper wall she had never been aware of inside her had broken down, leaving her wide open. He was in all the way now. Matt could have crushed him like a bug and she had feared for a second he might, but the lie about the police had been the right one. And if she had only said, Thank you, and left it at that. But the OCD she'd developed around him lately had to kick in. The What's-going-on-in-your-head obsession that never left her day and night anymore had made her blurt out the last question, and it had offended him to the core. She'd never dreamed he could be sensitive that way. She'd needed to know the answer: if he had thought through what would happen when the door opened, whether he just had a hero complex or whether it was...something more. His face when she voiced the question had stunned her, blue eyes wide, saying she'd gone too far, then curling in on themselves, all of him drawing back as neatly as the mimosa leaves she had caressed as a child. Protecting himself. Alone after he left, she had felt sick, limp as though the air had been sucked from the room, and she had leaned her body against the wall that connected her place to his (a thing she could never tell anyone, obsession gone so strange it frightened even her), palms pressed to the surface, imagining his skin.
****
"I'm not a big cookie-baker, but - you've been a lot of help lately and I wanted to thank you."
They stood on the sidewalk in front of their building. He was coming, she was going. For three days she had tried to catch him. She felt like a fool.
He stared at the unsealed envelope a second before taking it. "A...thank-you note?"
"No. That's two tickets to our opening performance tomorrow night."
"Hm, modern dance. I'm not going to like it, am I?"
"I hope you'll come."
"And this piece of paper is..."
"A backstage pass. So you can come see me during the break. Prove you were there."
"It's a handwritten note." He read aloud in disbelief. "'Let this guy in. Dani.'"
"Our doorman's one of the dancer's great-uncles. We're not Robbie Williams."
"Too bad. If you were, this might be worth something. Or Townshend. Now that I would have appreciated."
"'Who?'"
He winked. "Very good."
And she held that until the next night, held it close like a charm, the wink, the smile so fleeting that someone not enraptured by his face might have missed it. Not knowing whether he was watching, whether he had come alone, she flew through the first half, understanding Georg's anarchic choreography for the first time (she was a bird). During the break backstage she rubbed her ankles, stretched, anything to keep her eyes from searching for him, but they found him anyway, the shape of him in the wings registering out of the corner of her sight before she could take it in, making her heart rush. He had already seen her. He stood like the still center of a storm amid the bustle of dancers and crew.
"Hey."
"I'm glad you came."
"Proves I'm here." He watched the others. "Bet they think I'm some famous dancer whose career was tragically cut short by a leg injury."
"Actually that's what I told the door guy. And he's very talkative." Another tiny smile. "How do you like it so far?"
"You...don't want to know." She waited. "Okay. If someone had told me a week ago I'd be seeing so many flailing limbs, I'd have assumed a psychotic episode in the ICU."
"It's expressionist."
"Definition being: do whatever you feel, with no discernible pattern."
"Not discernible to you, I guess. Come on, it's not that bad, is it?"
He stopped studying the others and looked straight at her. Too long. The knowing look again, yet mixed with ...hesitation. "You look great up there."
The voice was so different it might have been another person. Devoid of sarcasm. With a jolt she realized she was hearing his real voice for the first time.
"Dani, five." Cyndi brushed by her. She remembered where she was. "Your hair." A lock of her hair had freed itself from the tight bun Georg insisted on. She fumbled with it. "I've - got to go," she told him. He was already turning to leave. "Guess this means you're not staying for the second half?"
"Oh, I'm staying."
An erratic second half, in which the stage had grown soft and Georg tightened steps unexpectedly, his face near hers frowning at her loss of focus; I am focused, she wanted to whisper to him, on a voice.
****
She left the party early. Enough of people asking who the guy with the cane had been, enough of answering, Just a neighbor. Of keeping her voice casual. In her apartment she stood still, listening. If he would only play his piano, even one note, make any sound at all, she would know he was awake, but it suddenly didn't matter. She was shaking. She had stepped outside the world, it seemed, the one in which she was adventurous, afraid of nothing, the dancer who saw what she wanted and took it. She was on unknown terrain and the next step was off a cliff. She was balanced on air. He might not catch her at all.
Then she was at his door, ringing the bell.
It took forever (which meant he had been asleep). A thump against the door (meant he was looking at her through the spyhole). Rattle of the chain.
He stood clutching his cane, open pyjama shirt, all too quick to take in. Eyes sleepy-concerned, almost alarmed. "What is it?" he asked.
(he would laugh he was gay he had a woman there already)
"Do you want to sleep with me?"
Time stopped.
His mouth opened then closed. A hundred expressions crossed his face.
"Yes," he said at last, in his real voice.
He held the door open and she walked in, heart beating wildly, her back to him.
"I've never done this before," she said. She heard him relocking the chain.
"Sleep with someone?"
"Knock on someone's door at midnight like this -" When she turned he was close, startling her, his brusque hand lifting her chin to make her look at him.
"And you're doing it now because you're drunk."
He saw his mistake in the same instant, his eyes going wide, and they both murmured No together. "At least not on booze," she whispered. Now.
His hand left her chin to touch her face, a thumb across her lips, eyelids: a blind man taking the measure of a sculpture though his gaze never left her eyes, then he was kissing her. His beard was softer than she'd imagined. She felt like rain inside. His free arm pressed her to him, hard, lips tightening, tongue at hers. Her hands felt his chest, his hair, his hips. He was hard as a rock already, when had that happened, the shape of his cock precise through the loose pants. He drew back, let his cane drop to the floor, used both hands to slip her sweater over her head and fling it away. When he looked her up and down she saw how hungry he must have been for a long time, almost starving, and something twisted inside her. He brushed the back of his hand up her abdomen to her breasts, knuckles stroking one firm nipple as though afraid to open his palm to it.
"Pick up my cane," he said.
She stooped and handed it to him. He took her by the arm, an urgent crush, then realizing it was rough, by the hand, and led her into the bedroom.
****
Her fingers slipping into his waistband, working it down over him.
"My leg."
"We won't hurt it, will we?"
"It's just...not a pretty sight."
"Oh." She covered his mouth with hers, grinning, and yanked his pants down. As they fell on the bed he was laughing or moaning, she couldn't tell and it didn't matter, the sounds moving between their mouths.
****
Clothes all gone. He took his time. Fingertips, to trace her neck, her thighs, even her feet; she was a specimen. Let him. Hands, to cup her bottom, knead, rush up to her breasts. She matched his slow savoring: her face in his hair, lips across his chest and the veins on his biceps (all the time wanting him in her, only that, weren't women supposed to like long foreplay). His cock was not thick but long, so that it curved up to touch his stomach. She bent to tease the tip there with her tongue, from where it stuck to his skin with the first pearl of wetness, and slid it into her mouth. His small yell of pleasure shook her. So hungry. His hands moved in her hair, guiding her, then giving up to the rhythm of her mouth, caressing, tightening, finally pulling her face up to his. "Too fast," he gasped. "I don't want..." You want, she almost cried out loud. You want and want and never get. Take. He seemed not to breathe, every muscle hard and taut to bursting, his entire body like his cock, engorged with desire. Eyes still as wide as they had been when she spoke at the door, believing-unbelieving, a child at Christmas.
And then he was in her, beside himself. She cried out on top of him, with him, moving into his thrust. He flipped them both, she didn't know how he could with the leg (the leg she would not let herself look at because he didn't want her to). Every thrust was like an explosion in her head, her thighs. He rippled above her, twisted her, he was wrapping himself in her. Arms and legs so tangled she didn't know whose skin her lips brushed.
****
Crucified from behind. Her body pinned against the headboard by the strength of his thrusts, palms spread to the wall. Little bites in the back of her neck he couldn't seem to let go of, almost gnawing. Animals did that. His hands bruised her shoulders and she forgave them. They were her hands. Every thrust was more violent, finding raw places inside her. His gasps grew quicker. She wanted to see his face. When he turned her from the wall and bent her forward, she twisted off him and he cried out. His eyes had changed color, dark blue seas, features chiseled clean with desire. She pulled him down on top of her, back inside of her, and at the last moment, an animal cry already in his throat, he took her hair in his hand and drew it over her eyes (the shock of it exploding inside her with her own orgasm), holding it there though she tried to snatch it back, a blindfold so she couldn't see his face when he came.
****
G.
Cherish this.
It was the moment between sleep and waking when the pain hadn't yet rebooted. He'd timed it - subjective, sure - at three seconds. Leg floating free of him somewhere, non-existent. He knew it was only an effect of the delta waves still sloshing through his brain. Pain had to shut down for sleep and he had trained himself to come fully awake before it could come rushing back in. To cherish every one of those three beautiful-beyond-belief painless seconds.
Second one.
His tender groin - god, it felt positively bruised - meant one thing: overkill the night before.
Second two.
Warm back pressed to his, leading down to what were decidedly buttocks - that would be the bruisee, so to speak, if he had gone at it with his usual fervor.
Ergo, the hooker hadn't left.
The pain flooding back - hello, second number three - was so intense it still shriveled him inside every morning, even after five years. And with it came memory.
No hooker.
He turned. She stirred, pulled the sheet back over a pretty shoulder. One brown eye opened, flecked with gold.
Don't smile. "You're still here."
Gold flecks evaporated. "Was I supposed to leave?"
Hadn't he told her last night he figured her for a dream? What other crazy stuff had he said? "I just thought you'd vanish when I really woke up." He inched the sheet down. "You know, you're getting up with me." She inched it back up and they played a little tug-of-war. "You are the reason I'm going to have the day from hell because I didn't get any sleep. You're getting up with me."
She was laughing. "Didn't know you could be so mean."
"You don't know the half of it." He rose before he could do something idiotic like brush the strand of hair from her face. "I'm making coffee."
In the kitchen he leaned against the counter to catch his mental breath. Small strings of explosions kept going off in his head, moments from the night before, bright and dark and strange; if he couldn't catch them now, he wouldn't know how to look at her when she walked in.
She had lain with her head on his chest afterward. "Your heart's so fast."
"Yes, your chosen lover's an old geezer who's going to die of a heart attack on you."
"Then you should hear my heart."
Simply, clinically, he had placed two fingers at her neck. "One-ten." At her taken-back look, he put his lips there instead, fingered a breast, nipple the color of brandy, felt her hands in his hair.
"Before you even walked through the door," he told her, stretching back out beside her, "I decided that this was just a very, very vivid dream. So you're going to have to say something."
"What?"
"Anything to prove you're real. Something my own mind couldn't have come up with."
She smiled and laid her head back on the pillow. "Dreams don't work that way." (Didn't he know it?) "Anything I say you'd tell yourself your mind had invented." A tiny frown curled her brow. "There is something I need to ask you. It's a little embarrassing." He waited. "I - um - don't know your first name." At his astonished look: "You're just G. on your mailbox."
"It's Greg."
"Hi, Greg."
"You know, I think that did it. I wouldn't have dreamed you'd go to bed with someone without knowing his name."
"So you're awake. Does that make it better or worse?"
"Oh, it couldn't get any better." She kissed him. "Okay, maybe it could."
They didn't talk for awhile. When they came back to themselves, she was watching him.
"Still...having a problem with this," he told her. "You, here. Me." He ran a finger down her cheek, her neck, all the way to one slender hip, tried to get his voice under control. "You must have men coming and going."
"They come and then they go. Actually, I think I scare them away."
"This the part where you pull the Sharon Stone knife out?"
She was grinning. "After we've made love the first time, I tell them they have to quote me a poem."
Several comments involving hell freezing over occurred to him. "Do any of them ever do it?"
"Some have."
"Has anyone ever turned the tables on you and made you quote a poem?"
By her look he'd managed to surprise her. "Not till now. English or German?"
"German?"
Her father had been German. Had died when she was fifteen (some deepness to the voice there, love or pain or both). She'd spent a year in Munich studying dance.
"So what rhymes with 'Mein Fuehrer'?"
Lying back, eyes closed, she had quoted something long and swishy and that rhymed as far as he could tell, but he'd stopped her with his mouth before she could finish, his cock, to his amazement, having started to swell again as he watched her.
Later he had diagnosed her. She got one cold after another in winter, had irregular periods and morning leg cramps - it was his standard guesswork (she was overtrained and had no body fat to speak of), but her look told him he'd got at least two out of three. He took another stab in the dark. "And you've had an abortion."
"You can't tell something like that by looking."
"Ah, but that slow blink gives you away."
She'd gone very still. "And do I sink in your estimation?"
"Morally, no. Intellectually, a lot. You have to be pretty dumb nowadays to get pregnant without wanting to."
"I was twenty. Actually, it's as easy as jumping in bed with someone on impulse, isn't it?" Ah. He ceded her point with a questioning look. "I have an IUD."
Later she went looking for ice-cream and excavated some in his freezer. "This is how I celebrate," she told him, bringing the bowl into bed to share with him. He refrained from telling her the stuff was probably three years old. As she nested down beside him, the sheet slipped off his leg and he saw how her eyes danced away to somewhere else - anywhere else. Please not that. The throbbing started up behind his eyelids. With a flourish that came up too rough, he flung the sheet back. "If you want to look at the leg, do it."
She held his gaze. "I thought you didn't want me to."
"Do it."
While she bent and studied the scar as though memorizing for a test, he studied a corner of the ceiling. Don't look at her face. That awful helplessness he could taste in his throat - always back in the hospital; she might have been a surgeon planning some more maiming, a finger (hers so gentle) mapping the puckered flesh. When she asked, he explained what had happened, resecting the Stacy parts. When she said, "That means it hurts to walk on?" he swallowed the acid taste in his throat, worse than bile, and said, "It hurts all the time."
Her eyes grew wide. She laid her head back next to his on the pillow. "Isn't there something you can take?"
"There are any number of painkillers." Hookers up there high on the list, babe. "My poison of choice is called Vicodin. Daddy's little helper. I take just enough to hover under the threshold of addiction."
Her look was accepting. Not naive, rather a kind of after-sex trust in his honesty. Then you will have to be honest.
"That's not true," he admitted. "I'm addicted.
Now that look, that was fear. Dawning realization of what kind of pit she was screwing around in. She hid it so fast it gained his respect.
"Yes," he said. "Your chosen lover has a lot of problems."
"My chosen lover's a beautiful lover."
Much later: "I just remembered a poem I can quote you after all."
"Tell me," she gasped.
"I'm concentrating on something else right now, in case you hadn't noticed."
"Now."
"Oh all right -
She offered her honor,
He honored her offer.
And so all night long
It was on her and off her.
See, told you it'd break my concentration."
There was a sound in the next room. He was holding something in his hand - a coffee filter. Through the kitchen door he could see her walk across the living room, her jeans back on, topless (that bringing him neatly out of his reverie) and he realized she was looking for the sweater he'd relieved her of the night before. She hadn't seen him. He watched her dress, still fumbling in his mind to put it all in some kind of order. Shouldn't have been. When she turned, he ducked back to the coffee machine. And no, it wasn't nerves. Just healthy morning-after caution.
"Morning." She leaned on the counter. Her hair was a mess.
"I'm impressed," he told her.
"That I got up?"
"That you put your own clothes on."
"I've - um - been doing that for a long time."
"Most women do that oh-so-cute morning-after thing where they put the guy's shirt on and run around in nothing else. Supposed to get him hot again or something. But no, you put your own clothes on. That's impressive."
"Glad you're so easy to impress. Plus you told me you had to go to work. Wouldn't want you getting hot again."
"Ah, if I'd said I was staying home, you'd be in my pyjama shirt."
"Probably not. It looked pretty grungy."
"Hey, it's a bachelor pad." And then it was verbal diarrhea time again - he was spouting some nonsense about dirt and messies and the genius within chaos because she stood so close, saying nothing, that tiny smile on those lips so knowing that he broke off in the middle of a sentence to whisper, "You're waiting for me to kiss you, aren't you?" and then they were and it was so easy, the hell with caution and reserve and let's see what happens.
When he was ten he'd once climbed the dare bridge over the lake they all swam in, all the way to the central arch, sixty feet above the water, while kids whooped below. Felt the wind limn the shape of his body, the blue and yellow sky spinning. No contact with the world except his toes and then he dove. He hadn't thought about that in years.
"I really do have to go to work."
"You started this."
"Who knocked on whose door at midnight?"
"So you see this as one long continuum."
He glanced down at himself growing hard. "That's...one word for it."
When they left it was late. As she was about to slip inside her own door in the hall he turned (we weren't going to say this, were we?): "See you tonight?"
"I'm dancing."
"Oh, right. Well, knock when you get in. You're good at that."
No reply but a smile and a closing door.
Dream or not, she was going to vanish. And probably soon. Life hadn't taught him all those lessons for nothing. The rationalist bastard inside him shrugged - so enjoy while you can - yet there was something else there. The wind limning his body as he pushed the bike to the limit, shooting up miniature death alleys between trucks. He was halfway to the hospital before he realized he hadn't had his little white breakfast at all.
End of Chapter 1
Hi, readers: The following is just the opening scene of Chapter 2, in here for Wilson fans, since this is where he first shows up. Hope to get the full version of Chapter 2 out by end of Aug.
Dancers - Chapter 2 (Possession)
J.
What happens if I do this?
He had known House for years before the sentence occurred to him. Probed and pondered and barely understood the man he called his best friend. The sentence was his own way of imagining what went on in the guy's head, House's curiosity about how things worked in a world that for his guillotine mind must have been almost always suicidally boring. It was the other man's deepest philosophy, he told himself, not just on diagnostic medicine, but on people, their feelings, life.
What happens if I do this?
A kid - albeit a genius one - poking buttons on a nuclear bomb.
Which was why he knew something was wrong.
The change was subtle, but inclination and training, plus an observance of House that bordered on obsession, meant he couldn't miss the new hesitancy in the other doctor's every word and gesture. Caution was his style, the polar opposite of House - non-explosive, every move thought-through, did he stand with his hands on his hips to give a patient terrible news or sit with hands palm-up in his lap - so he knew it when he saw it. As if overnight all that had been stage props for Greg House had become real things, breakable, the robot extras suddenly people. There was a startled solidity to his interface with them.
Someone coming out of a trance, surprised to touch the world and feel it pushing back.
Even now, the way he entered his friend's office, a piece of paper in his hand, some form, a quick look to check for visitors. He wasn't bursting in as he usually did. He was approaching.
"You got time? Dumb question. I need to talk at you about something."
Might as well plunge in. "Is this about your girlfriend?"
Opportunities to surprise House were rare; he sat back and savored the man's expression. It was short-lived. "Kudos." He sank into a chair, cane careless over the back. "Did you pull that rabbit out yourself?"
"Not alone. There's been speculation. Your fellows are top-notch doctors. One is even a neurologist, in case you've forgotten. You think they'd fail to notice the kind of severe personality change you've gone through the last three weeks?" House's eyes had narrowed, reviewing. Could he have been so unaware of how his behavior betrayed him? "I was there myself on the CNS lymphoma case yesterday. You left the room and we all realized at the same time that the entire conversation had contained not one put-down."
"Don't insult me -"
"Not one. Foreman and Chase were unanimous in concluding that this symptom can mean only one thing: you're getting some."
"And Cameron?"
"Oh, in denial as usual. Told them to stop being such men." Actually it hurt a little to see - in House's sidelong look at him - that his fellows had been right. That the niceness meant that for three weeks he had had a relationship - in itself unheard of in the last few years - and hadn't said a word about it to him. He was only being called in now for a consult, he guessed, because there was a problem. He sat back. "So - are you going to tell me her name?"
There ensued a story so chock-full of unbelievable, from a midnight knock on the door to a wicked encounter with a piano bench - the general story-arc being a dauntless, endless three weeks of sex so hot even the never-at-a-loss doctor found it hard to put in words - that he could only assume it was contrived. Only the very un-Housian starts and stops, as though the teller himself could barely fathom it all, made him think there was some half-truth in there.
The guy had met someone.
Details (some surely hyperbole): a dancer, twenty-six. Lived in the apartment next door. That one sounded right. He struggled for the memory: some stunning young thing passing him in the hall on his last visit. The face wouldn't come (he supposed he had suppressed it entirely, that kind of wishful thinking being detrimental to his already-stage-four marriage). She was intelligent, easy-going, gorgeous (a hitch to the assured House voice there).
"She wears sensible shoes."
"Good."
"She knows who Art Tatum is."
He raised an eyebrow "Very good." If it were true, it meant a lot.
"So - how do I get away from her?"
"Beg pardon?"
He waved the form in his hand. "This is an endocrinology conference in Chicago. Tomorrow and Friday. I need a few days to clear my mind. Figure out whether this goes on. I can tell her it's been planned for months. So, do I go?"
As usual, the conversation was already so sailor-knot complicated he needed all his concentration to keep up. Ellipses were a House specialty. He must have missed something.
"Let me get this straight. You're vaginally intubating this hot babe every night and you have to get away from that."
"Things are just getting a little too...intense."
He tried to picture intense. Something in the face across from him, the man's studious fumbling with the pencil-holder on his desk, told him that whatever intensity was unnerving him had little to do with bodies on bodies. The things that went on under the surface - feelings any relationship harbored - were clawing at him and it scared him. "You know what?" he told him. "By all means, go to Chicago. Leave me her number when you do."
"It's jake with me. Julia does not loom large in your mind, I take it."
"To be honest, I think this girlfriend doesn't exist."
"What?"
"I think you're jerking my chain, for some unfathomable reason. She's just too perfect. Piano bench? That's a great one -"
"Give me some credit here."
"I'm giving you credit. Your gags are always good, well thought out. I'm just wondering where this one's headed. Is it when you say you're dumping her and I can have her, and when I show up there's no one there or it's a Kirstie Alley look-alike? Besides which, in your own words from several years back, any woman who would be with you would, per definition, have to be either Stacy or a fawning, imbecilic masochist."
"Did I really say imbecilic?"
"Ergo: she doesn't exist."
House looked at him for a long time. "To use a term you might understand: I'm as serious as cancer."
Thought so. He gazed out the window. The sun threw a blinding shimmer on the balcony, little celebrations of hard light. House was asking for his opinion. He ought to get up and close the blinds. Asking him for his help. "So, what you want to hear from me is not whether you should go to Chicago, but what you should do when you get back." He sighed. "I haven't even met the woman. I'm supposed to give you some prognosis on the future of the whole thing, or how serious about you she is, or - or what?" He turned back. "You realize that if it were this Dani asking me, I'd tell her to run like hell."
"I'm sure you would."
"Much more concerned about her emotional safety than yours." As lies went, it was a whopper. House didn't seem to notice. He was getting up to leave.
"You should go to Chicago." It was blurted out, sounding foolish, but the look it got him was almost grateful. "Instinct's telling you that you need space, you should do it. Come back afterwards and just...let things happen."
"The waiting principle" He shrugged. "Works for diagnostics." At the door he turned. That hesitancy. "Thanks."
Alone, he got up and closed the blinds. The You're welcome that had hung on his lips for one small second would have been ludicrous. As if he'd done anything. Advice to House might as well have been written on spitwads and shot into a black hole. Yet he couldn't shake the sensation that this time the Great Ignorer had listened, that the world teetered on some edge and he may have given it a push.
****
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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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