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  Dancers - Chapter 2 
 by menme  

 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.

****

G. (Greg)

Intense, he had wanted to tell Wilson, was the wrong word.

What she was doing to him was a catastrophe. As the cliche went it was
like watching a train wreck. A good one, too. That train had needed
wrecking. And like the clich it had all been in slow motion so far, so he
could savor every moment of the life he'd set up to be so deliberately
casual flying off the rails. It was a rush. His peace of mind? Watch it
buckle. Concentration on his work? Crushed between two screeching freight
cars. Ability to be alone without feeling lonely? A smoking ruin beside
the tracks. 

He wanted her every second of every day, a pulsing ache at the back of his
head and groin that could care less what he was doing - researching a
case, riding to work. Examining a clinic patient's armpit rash. Eating
another hideous cafeteria lunch with Wilson, her scent would surround him
at some point, her voice layered into the white noise, so that he started
and had to stop himself from turning to look for her. Even now, in this
smoky gonzo hole called the Twelve-Bar Blues (he'd had his reasons for
picking Chicago), the horn man working up such a sweat even the low lights
trickled off him in puddles, she now entered, sat down, placed a ghost
hand on his chest. Hi, Greg.

The sex had come to mean more instead of less. No habituation. She was his
new drug (the Vicodin still finding its way down his throat, though, more
than ever after that first morning; he wasn't losing one minute of this
slick train wreck to the pain). With her soft skin and melting eyes she
was the hard stuff. It was as if all the sex he'd ever known, Stacy
included, had only been a gateway drug to her. When he needed her, like
now, she came (her body becoming the plucked strings of the bass up there,
her cries against him the contrapuntal rhythm), and it couldn't matter
less what he'd been doing or who he'd been talking to - he would feel her
waist between his hands, the exact small width of it, as though the skin
lay there against his palms, curving down to hips, around to that
tensed-tight ass above dancer's thighs. His mouth following, once he found
how much she liked it, down to her round dark bush, salty-sweet (bottle
that perfume, make a fortune), pinning her open with his arms because it
turned him inside out to feel her buck, tonguing until the last moment and
then drawing back to watch her come, her breathy Ohs all out of sync with
the pulse of her pink flesh there, five, six throbs, thick then slow, the
rhythm as ancient as blood, then the seam of wetness, more viscous than
what his tongue had laid down, his lips trailing it up along her breasts
to her hair, her mouth. They drank each other that way, she with drawn-out
sips of pleasure, he like a dying man in a desert. And when he opened his
eyes, Cameron would be staring at him from across the table as if he were
a lab result that made no sense, all three of them with their faces on
their default setting of clueless, only Foreman, his gaze a level keener,
leaning in to ask: "Where did you just go?"

"Intellectual heights you've never dreamt of."

The piano bench had been the catalyst. Intense. He'd left her lying in bed
that last night to go make himself a drink and his other lover had
beckoned, ivory keys a red gleam in the light from the bar across the
street. When he sat to play, something old floated up. He didn't give a
flip about classical, but he'd learned it all, it still came when he
wanted it, and then she was sitting there beside him, their naked hips
touching. "Did you know you could dance to Chopin?" she murmured. She
stood and danced in the buff for him, rubbery moves (Asian?), muscles
bunching when she went up on her toes (he didn't know if she was making it
up as she went along, but weren't they both?), lost in herself until he
came down on a wrong note, and then she came back to him, making him turn
to her on the bench and guiding him into her with her hand.

He'd led Wilson to think it'd been kinkier than it was, that the intense
lay in the kinky, but it had just been two people going at it straddling a
bench. It was the stillness that had frightened him. The way time had
...slowed. When he'd entered her a switch circuit had closed in his mind;
it was as though she were inside him, stroking her way out, splitting him
open while his right hand banged crazy chords as he sought support for his
thrusts, a hiation that - when he came - made him spill all of himself
into her until there was nothing left, his blood leaving him to circulate
through her as though her body were a filter, before coming back into him
cleaner.

Scary enough to push him onto a plane for Chicago.

"Fugue state," said a voice. Fat wieners waved in his face. Someone's
fingers.

"Catatonia," said another. A face loomed near his, Sanders from Hopkins,
the endocrinologist ugly as sin (the kind you don't confess), veins like
worms on his nose because he'd started to drink more since they last met.

The lap dance he'd ordered was over. The strip joint was so smoky his eyes
burned (where was the jazz club?). With a start like a bolo punch to his
chest, he remembered it was the second night in Chicago. He must have at
least checked in to the conference, hooked up with these two bozo doctors,
but he had no memory of it nor of deciding to hang with them (had he
become such a headcase?) and take in some strippers. Severe dissociative
amnesia there. He did remember thinking that maybe the sight of really big
boobs might make him forget her for a while (the thought lame enough to
make him cringe now).

"At a hundred a pop you should have gotten more out of it." The fat one
(name lost to boring) rolled his eyes at Sanders.

He stood and shrugged on his jacket. "I think I'm coming down with
something," he told them. The stripper (and those hooters should have been
adequate to the task) was still watching him as she turned back to the
stage, a shadow of a smile on her lips. Whatever she'd sensed, she knew it
wasn't her doing.

The night air cooled him. Ugly was good - the backstreet slick with
drizzle just starting, a fungal smell from the garbage cans. Brought him
back to earth. It was beauty that was dangerous. Addictive. He didn't want
to feel beauty - the moments when what she did to him made him forget
there was such a thing as pain - because when it ended (and the when was
inevitable, he knew) the withdrawal would be so godawful that the few
times he'd tried to kick the pills would seem like a day at the beach. He
took another breath, the air cold for early fall, the rushing sounds of
the crowd a blur in the bright fluorescent light, forget wars, airports
were the true man-made hells, all pretentious luggage and families
screaming hellos, but she'd come to meet him. When he didn't bend to her,
she went up on tiptoe to kiss him. "How was Chicago?"

"Full of jazz."

"Yours too now, I bet."

"I'll let you believe that."

In her kitchen he caught the first frown. The casual hand drawn back from
his arm when he didn't respond. She wasn't pushing the issue. He leaned on
the counter fondling a drink. I'm waiting for time to stop, he wanted to
tell her, so I can say this. He realized it wasn't going to.

"You know why I really went to this conference?"

She had gone very still beside him. "No."

"I wanted to get away from you."

It was a statement of fact. When he saw her face he realized what it
sounded like, but she was already turning to a chair. In a voice he'd
never heard from her before she said, "I guess I'll sit down for this
one." 

Breathless. He was as out of breath as he had been in his former life
after running ten miles. He studied the kitchen; she had cleaned up (for
him?), as messy - he had found - in her way as he was. The bright colors
gleamed, the opposite of his own caveman decor. Could it be so hard to
say? He said, "It didn't work."

She stared. "What does that mean?"

Sunny simple colors, no girlish floral patterns. Keep your eyes on the
corner. "Means I didn't stop thinking about you for a second." His voice
sounded like a teenager's. When he finally looked at her eyes, their wide
defenseless waiting, he felt something give away inside. He shrugged.
"Means you're more interesting than toxic goiters." He thought about it a
moment as he sat down across from her. "Which isn't saying much."

The silence had turned easy. She studied him, smiling. "Look," he said.
"I'm... prone to addiction. And - that's what this is starting to look
like. I just thought you ought to know."

"I can be pretty obsessive myself." She was standing, coming around the
table to him. "So. I think that's enough serious for one day. Let's go out
and do something."

So easy. "What?"

"Anything. What did you do before me? And do not tell me you watched TV."

"Okay, I won't tell you. Let's see, staying with the general subject of
addiction..."

They rode his bike into town and he showed her how to bet on the horses.

So easy.

****

D.

She had never been any better at reading people than most women, but it
was as if she saw his thoughts. As if she'd known him all her life - when
he said and did certain things the dark scenery behind his rude - or
gentle or incomprehensible - action leaped across to her like a spark and
she understood him.

Jerk took on a new meaning. When he stopped in the middle of ordering to
tell the waiter he was a moron and should cut back on the meth because it
was killing him, he had an agenda. When he scowled so hard at a child
staring at his cane that it made the kid cry, it was from a deep well of
humiliation he had to pretend didn't exist or it would drown him. The
world hurt him - had hurt him many times - without meaning to and he would
change it by not accepting it the way it was.

He talked about his work - never shut up, in fact - things that had gotten
bottled up, she understood, when there was no one to talk to, half of it
so bizarre - leprosy and plague and measles in the brain - that she began
to realize he just naturally went over the top a lot. She could accept
that too. Everyone stretched the truth - no, everyone lies, she could hear
him saying - but she wouldn't call him on it. She knew all the names, his
succinct descriptions of them (Aussie wuss, great hair being her
favorite). They were all important to him, though she guessed they would
never have suspected that. Wilson's my handler, he told her one night in
bed. Adding: And I do mean that in the zoological sense. Wilson was the
one she wanted to meet. Unless she came down with the world's rarest
disease, he might never let her see where he worked, but she wanted to be
a part of his life, however meager he made it out to be. 

When he had a case (odd in itself, that he didn't have cases all the time,
though she assumed he only allowed the complicated ones to occupy him)
then he became a kind of machine intelligence, sitting staring at the
piano keys for hours, sounding a note every few minutes, or pulling the
bike over to the side of the highway with her on the back to make a note
on whatever just occurred to him. She ceased to exist for him during those
times, and she could live with that too. He was focused to the point of
excluding all else then, and she noticed that whenever it happened he took
less of the painkillers.

He got phone calls, the language as incomprehensible as her German would
have been to him, mugas and mursa and RBCs. MDeity-speak, she told him,
they were all playing doctor-gods. Coming back from a bar at two a.m.
(he'd woken her up and said he had to go somewhere to think about a case
and did she want to come, then had talked about Stacy instead, a subject
he'd strung about twenty words together on since she'd known him, scary
because it told her how deep the hurt went), she had found his answering
machine flashing.

"You've had three messages in your absence, Dr. House."

"That so?" He had his arms around her, hands cupping her in the way that
always turned her on. "Now if you were my secretary, you'd know I always
ignore my messages." 

"You ignored mine long enough, if I recall."

"That wasn't ignoring. I just couldn't believe I was going to get that
lucky."

"For a while there, I thought you were gay."

"You didn't."

"I did."

"You really thought I was playing for the pink side?"

"There was a good chance."

"There was a bad chance." He hit the button without looking. An Australian
voice filled the room. "Chase," he told her.

"I think I could tell from the accent."

He skipped to the next. A woman. "Cameron."

"I think I could tell from the tail-wagging admiration in the voice." It
was the first time she'd let him know how much she'd read into his few
mentions of Cameron. 

He gave her an almost embarrassed look. "We're going to have to do
something about that telepathy of yours." He skipped to the next.

"Don't you need to hear what they say?" she asked, laughing.

"Oh, this is Foreman. He'll have the goods." The last voice spouted
numbers without beating around the bush and he was punching in a phone
number before it even finished. "No", he blurted into it, as if continuing
a conversation interrupted seconds ago. "And which of you idiots thought
that would work?" He was already picking up his helmet. She was lost to
him. "I'll be there in twenty minutes. No, do not do that, if any of you
does they're fired -"

When she was alone, she rewound the tape to hear the voices again. He had
called it telepathy, but it was more a heightened state of listening. A
need to know everything about anything that mattered to him. The voices
mattered, the minds behind them. There had been a catch in his sarcastic
tone when he said their names, so far over at the edge of audible that
anyone not attuned to him might have missed it. A surge of something like
pride.

****

"Would you stop with the hair? That's the third time you've put it behind
your ear. Do not tell me you're nervous."

He'd tried to tell her dinner for four at the Wilsons' would be casual,
but the building had had a doorman and the elevator was all gilt and
glass, and it was his best friend after all, the man who opened the door,
though not at all what she'd expected. Not a snob, but not a rock-concert
T-shirt guy in the Greg style, and opposites in personality, she saw
instantly, the sheer politeness a little shocking, though Greg had warned
her. She let him take her coat, told him she refused to call him Wilson
like Greg did and got back a grateful "James." He was the kind of doctor
you'd want, she supposed, if you were dying of cancer, whereas Greg, she'd
long ago surmised, was the kind you'd want to die just to get away from.
She could tell the guy was holding back some shock of his own (a reaction
she knew from introducing Greg to her friends, the what-was-she-thinking
bemusement, though in Wilson's case it must have been more a
how-does-he-rate-her). He didn't seem to fit the place, with its
anigre-wood paneling and a glass case of what looked like Lalique
figurines, but when his wife Julia came out of the kitchen and shook her
hand, stiff, she knew the apartment was her domain, the poor guy just a
visitor in his own home. 

(Greg had explained Julia to her before they came. "Washes her sponge,"
he'd said. A woman had to wash her sponge now and then, she'd replied.
"She runs it through the dishwasher and in case that wasn't enough, she
microwaves it. To kill the germs." She'd thought about it a moment. "Your
friend Wilson has a problem." "Yep.")

She offered to help in the kitchen, leave the guys alone to talk about
her. Seconds later Greg was leaning in the door. "Hey Dani, Wilson figures
I must be paying you to be my girlfriend."

Julia gasped. "You did not say that."

"I didn't mean it like that - " Wilson blustered. She wondered if he set
himself up for Greg that easily all the time. "I just said there's no
way... well, what I meant was ..."

She smiled to make him feel at ease. "If he is, I haven't seen any of the
money yet."

Dinner was talk about health care and whether the wine went with the fish.
When Greg went off to help Julia feed the dishwasher (no idea where that
came from, other than that he wanted to see whether she'd put the sponge
in again) she and Wilson were alone for a while. Talk turned to Greg.

"He's a really good doctor, isn't he?" she asked.

"The slow smile said a lot. "If you're looking for bedside manner and
emotional support, you'd be better off buying a houseplant. If you're
truly dying of a mysterious disease, he's the go-to guy."

"You mean, he doesn't give up."

He studied the air for a moment. "Ever see a pit-bull really chomp down?"

She liked him.

They had after-dinner drinks (Julia's choice) and hospital stories
(Wilson's). Either he tended to exaggeration too or medicine was that
insane. She let them know she suspected the one about the MP3 player was
an urban legend.

"It is now," Greg said. He downed his scotch. "People are stupid."

"This is where you say, Present company excepted."

"Present company not excepted. You're stupid. I'm stupid. Me being aware
of it, though, may keep me from doing stupid things."

"And you're rude to other people in order to..."

"Shake them up. Keep them from doing stupid things too."

"Get it?" Wilson told her. "He's saving the world, one insult at a time."

She remembered something she'd read. "Freud says civilization started the
first time someone threw an insult instead of a spear." She could feel
Greg turn to stare at her, the finger caressing the back of her neck grown
still.

"Oh, right," Wilson groaned. "Encourage him. Now he's promoting
civilization with every put-down."

"Hey, it's why my patients love me."

"The only patient who ever loved you was an eighty-year old with syphilis.
I still have the love poem she wrote him, Dani. You should hear it -"

"I burned it."

"Not the copy I made." He rummaged in a drawer behind him.

The struggle that ensued, Greg trying to perforate the sheet of paper with
his cane from across the table before Wilson could read it aloud, and the
flaky poem that followed left her teary-eyed with laughter. Greg actually
blushed, something she hadn't known was possible, and when she pointed it
out to them, adoring the bright red flush on his face while she made it
worse (chances for her to derail him like that were few and far between
and she knew he forgave her) she caught a glimpse of Wilson's cautiously
happy look.

And later in bed, with Greg so deep inside her, gently probing, pulling
out to the very edge and sliding back in, their sweat mingling, she
remembered that look, and was relieved, because it meant that the fear she
had begun to harbor - that he had no one else in the world except her -
was not true.

****

G.

It was a problem in edge definition.

As the weeks melted, his edges bled into hers. If he had even wanted to
separate her from him now, he would have had to tear into himself. He knew
Wilson watched him like a rabid ICU nurse, wary and wondering, while his
fellows just took their luck in stride. He was altered. The gray rush his
days had once been had slowed to a stroll (still with a limp, though),
allowing moments to shine through.

Thy had exchanged keys and some mornings he woke, having gone to bed
without her, to find she had slipped in late after a performance without
waking him just to sleep beside him. Her back against his so warm and
...known that it registered for a second as a part of him. Edge
definition. He would turn to watch her sleep, never bored by her beauty as
he was by the model-perfect faces modern life said he should love. Her
face held a gorgeous that had nothing to do with glamour, big hair or
make-up; there was a swept-clean simplicity about it, so that he found
himself making moronic comparisons in his head: a wheatfield rustling in a
single rhythm, a still lake.

He wanted to get inside her head, something he could have said of at best
three people in his entire life. He had a new whiteboard to work on - hers
- and it was already full of contradicting lines and arrows.

Bright nuggets of conversations allowed him to piece her together.

"Greatest fear?"

"That nothing's real." Dani gazed out across Lake Carnegie, silver in the
cool of evening. The chatter from the bar behind them might have been
surf. Lights had begun to flicker on, far away from the bench they sat on.
It was late September. Her hair smelled of leaves.

"You're afraid there's no meaning."

"I'm afraid there's no...physical. That I could be sitting in a padded
cell and the doctors are wondering who I'm talking to. How would I know?"

A thought that prodded his own fears. No use telling her that. "Would it
matter if you didn't?"

"Spoken by a true solipsist."

"- if we were the only two real things in the universe? Us and the bench
here."

"It's hard enough."

Would it matter? He told her about Stacy, in little one-act pieces, over
time dredging up the whole sordid, stupid leg thing, making no judgment
calls as to what Stacy might have felt (just the facts, ma'am), and then
letting it drop again. Dani seemed to absorb it. One night over prawns at
Half Moon's, in the middle of an entirely different conversation, she
asked: "Why did Stacy leave you?"

He let his surprise fill the silence for a moment. "You want to know the
truth or what I think?"

"The truth is impossible to know. I imagine Stacy doesn't even know why."

"Can you imagine why?"

"Might have had something to do with you being a total jerk." When she
smiled at him like that he wanted to store it up, take it back out
sometime later when he needed it. No man should have to go through life
without a woman looking at him like that.

He bent his head over his plate, trying to stop his own grin. "Right."

"Still makes her an idiot."

He probed whenever he could, just good doctoring. One day she mentioned
she hadn't told her mother back in Pittsburgh about him. He pounced. "Why
not?"

"I would have to tell her how old you are and she would freak. I told my
sister on the phone. She found it hard enough to swallow."

"At least that means this father-fixation thing hasn't come up before."

"Is that what you think it is? I'm glad you've got it figured out, Herr
Doktor."

She seemed obsessed with his work and he tried to describe the ducklings
to her, Cameron coming the easiest.

"You know the four stages of loss. Well, Cameron starts in the acceptance
stage - everyone's nice, everything's good - and as soon as whoever she's
getting to know turns out to be a jerk, she moves straight to denial,
where she basically sticks until further notice. Or until something nudges
her back to acceptance, where it starts all over again. That's the gamut
of her responses."

"Is that what happened in her relationship to you?"

He gave her his you-got-me grimace. "There goes that telepathy again." He
shrugged. "Cameron operates on dream math." He'd used the phrase before,
and Dani had understood it immediately. It was what he called the way most
people saw life, a kind of magic thinking, their conviction that they
could influence matters just by peter-pan believing hard enough. It was
the opposite of his own philosophy: do the math, the real math, and you
could reduce life down to a few numbers that always applied - if you did
this, then that happened - always. Dani had listened and then told him -
while he stared off into space pretending it didn't bother him - that his
was just an inverse dream math, that he had convinced himself he could get
a handle on life's chaos with logic instead of letting it wash over him
like everyone else did. That he'd drown one day clutching his numbers,
amazed at the last minute that they didn't work. "Bodies are predictable,
Greg. Minds aren't. And it's minds you work with, not just bodies. The
mind rules, or we wouldn't be human, just machines. Dream math is the math
you have to apply if you're dealing with people. You're the one who's in
denial about that."

Her peopleness frightened him. They went to the MOMA (her idea - a Dali
exhibition, she'd told him. Salvador or Barbie? he'd asked). Splotches of
cool color, no meaning. 

"It's sperm," she told him as they contemplated a canvas of wiggly white
shapes.

"Now did Barbie Dali actually say that?" She didn't know. "I should have
blown two bucks on a guide."

He watched her as she approached a man with a guide book on the other side
of the room (younger than him, lots better dressed) and asked if the book
said anything about the painting, watched them laugh, the man reacting to
her like a tissue sample to the right test, as reliable as chemistry.
They'd known each other since the start of evolution. When she turned to
come back, he glanced away before she could see he'd been watching.

"No sperm," she told him

"That a fact?"

It was Chase who made him understand. A simple gesture, the Aussie
snatching up his bottle of Vicodin as it sat on the conference table, just
wanting to read the dosage apparently, out of boredom. He set it back down
when he saw his boss's face. But the second had told him something - the
twinge as a hand not his own had closed over what was his, what he needed,
watching it lift away from him. He had to stop himself from shouting Give
that back! It explained the dread he felt some mornings waking up to feel
her pressed against him, when fear should have been the furthest thing
from his mind. She might not be planning to leave him on her own, but she
could be snatched away.

She persuaded him to attend another performance (the costumers had gone
all out on Dani, little hot-pant item with fringe; made him keep his coat
over his lap all evening), and the male lead he'd paid no attention to the
first time - long blond ponytail, cut torso - caught his attention. He and
Dani were the stars of the show. When Ponytail lifted her over his head
(her crotch as close to his face as it could get without taking her
hot-pants off, and under the guy's own formidable muscle power) it twisted
his gut in a way he wished he could put a stop to. The program called him
Georg. Georg the German apparently ran the place.

He told her he could pick her up after a rehearsal (he'd catch hell from
Cuddy for skipping clinic but he didn't care). The room when he finally
found it (one flight up, no elevator, his leg already aching) reeked of
sweat and a more acrid musk, might as well call it youth, October sun
through the giant windows glinting off bodies, their chatter, the fast
fluid moves - and slow erotic ones - the quickest way to a headache. Two
different kinds of music collided at the room's center - how did they
practice like that? He was early, not too early or she might guess it was
deliberate, and she wasn't finished. He stood on the edge to watch. And
was watched, he noticed. Enough of them knew who he was, he took it.
Ponytail was slo-moing some pas de deux thing with Dani that obviously
needed close coordination, wrapping his marble arms around her.
Positioning her. They moved like one person (he strangled the thought
before it could reach his face). The guy was the alpha dog, all right,
barking orders when she didn't dance it right, that apparently being
often, though he didn't know how you could tell. The bossman seemed truly
angry with her and that surprised him. It was the wrong thing, the symptom
that pointed to something else. When he saw Ponytail's eyes sliding toward
his corner when he figured he wasn't looking, he thought he knew. And when
the guy yelled at her again and it wasn't English, his head began to
throb. He had to do something. 

He sidled over to the dancers grouped near him. "What burr got under his
foreskin?" he asked them. It broke them up, one guy - South American by
his looks - snorting his water through his nose, and he saw their boss
glance over at the noise. From their general replies it appeared Adolf
wasn't always this bad and certainly not with his star diva. Meant the
guy's mood was all for him. Which meant one thing. 

Male rivalry.

Easiest diagnosis in the world.

He stopped watching the German, keeping his eyes on the snorter instead
because it provided him more insight, and after a moment he caught it - a
glance that was not a smirk as much as it was pity. A
wonder-if-the-guy-knows look.

Then Dani was in front of him, going up on her toes to kiss him. "Let's
get out of here," he told her.

And they ended up in a bar with half the troupe. Hadn't wanted to, but she
could do that to him, and there were surprises. The guy who did a rail of
coke while Dani leaned across saying, "Shel, you know he'll fire you if he
sees that." When the guy proffered him some, he waved him off, telling
them the LSD he'd dropped the week before had been enough, and when they
laughed (Dani caressing his arm, my boyfriend the comedian) he let them
think it was a joke. Then Shel was suddenly hiding his stash, everyone
going quiet a little too fast, and a swish of words came from behind him.
Elvis was in the building. Dani swished something back. He'd heard her
speak German before - the bakery on Third, a phone call to her sister.
Whenever he tried to give her medical advice, mostly on eating more, she
would smile and say, Jawohl, Herr Doktor (his inevitable reply being, Just
call me Mengele). Yet she had always translated for him. The fact that she
didn't now, that they didn't switch over, Ponytail running on for half a
minute before turning to be introduced (that hand casual on her shoulder),
was all so rude - and he knew from rudeness - that it was like a slap in
the face.

"Greg -" Dani touched his leg and he turned, making it nonchalant. "Meet
Georg." She said it Gay-Org.

He leaned back. "So you're the Nazi who runs this concentration camp." 

The stunned silence at the table left a hole in the bar's noise.

"And I run it very well." Apart from the narrowed eyes, Gay-Org recovered
quickly, had to give him that.

"You've got them all goose-stepping. That's good." The utter quiet got a
tad quieter. Didn't any of them ever get in the guy's face? They acted
like they figured he'd be marched out back now and shot. Without looking
at her, he knew Dani's mouth had become that small hard line.

"Let's start all over," she said too cheerfully. "Georg, this is Greg."

Ponytail smiled. "Who will not be goose-stepping any time soon, I
believe."

"Oh, nice!" He could almost like the guy if he hadn't taken such a dislike
to him. He turned to Dani. "You might as well give up."

"I - just did."

He hooked a chair over with his cane. "So why don't you sit that tight
little butt down, Gay-Org, and drink with us."

And later:

"Why did you go for Georg's throat like that?"

Dani had been quiet the rest of the evening while Ponytail talked about
his years in London (hence the funky mixed accent), even quieter on the
way home.

"Rude people do that to me."

"The master speaks."

"Autonomic reflex."

"Also known as knee-jerk." She leaned against his piano, studying him. Her
eyes gave him the jitters. "He hadn't said anything to you to be rude
with."

"No, he said it all to you, didn't he?"

"Mom, he started it." Her gaze narrowed. "So we always speak German with
each other. So what?"

Even in bed. He fingered the bottle of pills in his pocket. "Guy just
needs taking down a notch or two."

"This is jealousy, isn't it?" Her voice had turned wondering, a little
smile hooking the corners of that perfect mouth, the same suppressed
delight she'd shown when he blushed at Wilson's. My boyfriend the joke.

"Not jealousy. Envy maybe. I always wanted a ponytail like that." He
lowered his voice. "They're phallic symbols, you know. All that limpness."

She pushed off from the piano to stand close, her clean scent of air and
rain edged now with bar smoke. He wanted to touch her. His hand in his
pocket tightened on the bottle.

"I'm going to assume it is jealousy," she said.

"Then you'll have your reasons for doing so."

It wiped the smile off her face. He went in the kitchen, dry-swallowed two
of his babies and chased them with scotch from a half-empty bottle. She
watched him from the door.

Maybe they weren't doing it. Maybe the moments, very late, when he lifted
her hand from where it pressed his chest, ran his lips down her wrist, her
forearm, caressing the hairs there, nuzzling into the crook of an elbow as
if looking for a vein, drinking her scent there where it was strong -
maybe that simple intimacy with her was his alone. Yet the fact remained
that someone else did that with words. He knew enough of neurology to
imagine how a language you'd grown up with clicked inside the brain. The
guy caressed her mind. Apart from the dancing, they had the intimacy of a
shared language, when he couldn't even always get it right with her in
English. And wasn't the dance just another kind of pillow talk? One he
could never aspire to. Ponytail lifting her, sliding her down his chest,
his mouth close to her mouth, her tits.... He realized his hand was
rubbing his leg and he made himself stop.

She was saying something. Jealousy was insecurity and how could anyone so
self-assured. She analyzed too much, her only fault. I'm as self-assured
as the next cripple with a cane, he thought at her. Made him want to laugh
and that was the stuff kicking in. Either she didn't know the effect she
had on men, impossible, or she didn't realize how she let herself be
manipulated by them. Without warning he slapped his hand down on the
countertop, not quite a slam, just enough to make her stop and stare, and
in the harshest voice he could muster while she stood there like that, he
said, "Come over here."

When she walked over to stand in front of him he turned away and poured
himself another drink. "Just wanted to see if you would. There's your
wrong signal." Her mouth fell open. 

"That was - what - a test?"

"There are certain men you don't want to obey when they order you around
like that."

"I usually don't."

"You do with Gay-Org."

"He's my boss."

"And what am I?"

Her gaze, locked on his eyes, softened, the silky look from a hundred
moments in bed, the one he couldn't do without anymore. "You're...you."

But who was he? Dani thought she knew him, but if he ever let loose with
what he was capable of it would be the end of it. She'd bolt like anyone
else not bound by a job contract to hang around with him. He hadn't wanted
to force the learning curve, but his little test had been more of a test
than she realized.

Just the fact that she hadn't flipped him off and walked out got her an
A+.

She was tough. Few of those he knew could give back as good as they got
from him. Stacy, of course. Wilson, who was not good at it, too
moralizing. Cuddy. Of his fellows, only Foreman did occasional justice to
the art of the come-back. Dani was different. It was as if she was immune
to his worst utterances, as though some antibody in her filtered out the
bad and left only understanding. She said whatever she wanted back to him,
about his leg, his attitude. She played with him, but her teasing always
managed to tease out something serious.

Moments. "You look great in peach." She wore her peach robe and he leaned
against the counter watching her throw breakfast together. Time leapt out
at him now as it never had before, breakfasts and noons and nights fully
felt.

"Am I peachy?"

"I could march you right back into the bedroom."

She gave him her tease glance. "You couldn't march anyone anywhere. Oh,
you might insult them into bed, or browbeat them into bed -"

He reached across and whacked her bottom lightly with his cane.

The change was so sudden it scared him. She whirled on him, furious.

"Don't ever do that again! What do you think I am?"

He gave a chastised-puppy shrug and studied her from the side, his
curiosity fired.

"Well, what?"

"Methinks the lady doth not like it for a reason." He waited. "Bad
experience?" Another thought occurred. "Good experience?"

"Stop it." She sighed. "Okay. I had this boyfriend -"

He groaned. "Why do all your stories start like this?"

"We'd been screwing like minks for two weeks when he announced he
was...into spanking. And wanted to."

"You him or he you?"

"He me."

He couldn't hold back the grin. There were so few opportunities to
embarrass her. "And...you let him. Did you enjoy it?"

"I felt like an idiot. I broke up with him shortly thereafter."

"How shortly?"

"About forty minutes." They were both laughing now, but he grew quiet and
watched her. 

"I've come to know your looks," she said, "but I can't figure that one.
It's either How-could-you or it's
Dani-I-was-wondering-how-to-tell-you-this."

He realized what she was getting at. "Nooo. Not into B or S, or any of
those other letters."

"Whew"

"Ditto. As if I need role-playing. I do enough of that at work." He
studied her. "Maybe a little rape now and then."

"Rape's okay." He pretended shock. "Women have rape fantasies, Herr
Doktor. It's just the Rape That Never Was. It's the
incredibly-handsome-man-ties-you-up-and-has-his-way rape. Never the
thug-beats-you-to-a-pulp-then-sticks-foreign-objects-up-you-when
he-can't-get-it-up rape." A notion crossed her face at the same moment it
occurred to him. She looked him up and down. "You would have to be very
fast," she whispered.

As she started to move he snatched her from behind, pinning her arms to
her sides. It would have been hard to hold her even if they hadn't both
been laughing, but dance classes apparently included one called Slippery
Moves because she did something that felt anatomically impossible and was
out and mamboing away. He spun from the counter to make a grab for her and
came down hard on the wrong leg.

The pain shot all the way to his head. He let out a cry he managed to
pinch back into a gasp - the kind of sound he would have done anything
never to let her hear - and caught himself on the back of a chair.

She was at his side, alarmed. "Is it your leg?"

"Came down wrong." He kept his head turned.

"Will it be all right?"

"Shut up!"

The words were out before he could stop them. In the space between their
bodies they sounded alien, too loud. They were from another world, the
ugly one he dwelt in with others, yet she absorbed them and they were
gone. As if she grasped by instinct that they weren't directed at her, but
at everything other than her - life, himself. He tried to straighten.

Her voice was low. "Maybe we could just cut to the chase." She stepped
closer. "I mean, to after the chase. We could pretend you already caught
me." He turned to stare. She was amazing. As though he'd just stubbed his
toe, hey let's get back to the important stuff. The best reaction he could
imagine. Oblivious - or determined to be oblivious - to his pain. Another
A+.

Yet when he looked in her eyes a tingling crept over him. She was biting
her lip, pupils brighter with desire than he'd ever seen them, something
there was turning her on, and the notion he'd relegated to a dark closet
since the first night flashed in his mind, doors cascading open, other
circuits closing. No, don't let it be that.

Forget that. Her body was pressed to him now, his cock swelling so fast it
was scary - had to be bad for the vascular system - then he had her on the
floor, wrists pinned with one hand while he flung her robe open with the
other, breasts too small to sag to the side, always standing straight up
at attention for him, dark plum aureoles so large they seemed to make out
half the pink flesh, nipples that hardened under his lips, the unglazed
tiles hard against his knees, his own hardness crushed to her stomach, and
she groaned and whispered, "This is a nice rape."

Which made him laugh, nooo, no role-playing today, a real attack of the
sillies, a sillies tsunami, like some wave of tension crashing, and he
rolled off her, breathless with laughter.

"No, don't stop!"

"You ruined it."

She straddled him. "I'll just have to rape you."

"Technically impossible. It'd have to be against my otherwise iron will.
Unless you plan to stick some of those foreign objects up me."

"Methinks the guy might like it." At his look: "You're the jailbird."

"One night. Come to think of it, I was so out of it, they could have done
anything to me." She looked a question. "They took my children away."

"Ah, that's why you looked so awful the next morning."

"Awful? Whatever happened to incredibly handsome?"

"It was an incredibly handsome awful."

His erection had reached the pain stage. "Do something about this," he
murmured.

She turned and straddled him backward, bottom open to his hands, that
perfect inverted-heart shape. When she took his cock in her mouth, he
thought his heart would explode. It was always like that with her, a fire:
blue-hot, scouring everything away. Sanity the first to go. She drew back
the moment before he came (her one distaste, he knew) and the kitchen
reeled above him, he needed it all too much, even if it was crazy, needed
that one moment of utter bliss when she would do anything for him, and he
was suddenly forcing her head down, crying, "Please, I want to come in
your mouth," and then she did and he was, and it was like a little rape.

When she turned back to him, he didn't look her in the eyes. He waited for
his heart to slow. She kissed him. "So, are you going to break up with me
in forty minutes?" Ah, taking cover in the joke that was no joke. Very
lame.

She stared. "What?"

"Never mind."

Yes, she was a straight-A student. And no, he didn't trust her, or rather
it was his own ability to hold onto her he didn't trust, those nagging
little flashes of self-doubt that no one who knew him only superficially
would have imagined of him, Mr. Bluster himself, but it all came down to
the question of what it was she saw in him. Whether she saw him at all.
Whether she ought to.

He searched her apartment one evening while she was gone, expertise (oh,
he'd missed his other calling as a detective) leading him straight to:
e-mails in German to her sister (too complex to decipher on the spot),
sleeping pills in the nightstand (a surprise), tons of laxatives (no
surprise, dancers obviously prone to the same flat-tummy obsession as
models were) and the diary, dark green leather, tucked away beneath towels
in the bathroom cabinet (well-hidden, and what did that say about how she
saw him?). Holding the notebook in his hands, he was suddenly shy, a kid
who finally gets that date with gorgeous, but what's she really like. And
then he realized he wasn't going to read it. Not an attack of conscience,
what a thought. It was just that if she was capable of drivel, he told
himself, he didn't want to know. He skimmed instead, looking for the name
Georg, but nothing jumped out. Then he turned to the date he always had in
his head, the night she'd knocked on his door, he couldn't help himself.
She'd written just one word underneath the dateline:

Greg 

All the pages after it were blank.

He stared so long he forgot where he was. Ran a hand across the letters as
though it were her body. It was either very good or very bad. Coming back
to himself with a start, he replaced the diary under the towels, leaving
not a fold out of place, and returned to his apartment where he sat and
watched the red neon bar sign wink on and off. 

When she stole in at midnight, expecting him to be asleep, happy that he
wasn't and all excited about something that had happened in the
performance, he listened, took her in his arms and - without knowing when
he had stopped - realized he had started breathing again.

****

End of Chapter 2 (Hi, readers. Chap 3 out by end of Sept., with some
Cameron in it. Yes she still loves him.)  
   Please post a comment on this story.  


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