Her

Just once.

Just once, so he—the need of him—will be flushed from your system. Sex as an antibiotic.

That way, when you’re screaming at each other in your office or in the clinic or in the hall, you’ll be able to concentrate better because the lightness of your head and the lace-to-flesh sensation under your shirt and the scratch of your stockings and the liquid warmth in your abdomen won’t distract you.

That way, when he’s toying with your pens or his cane or tossing that damned ball or picking at his guitar, you won’t be thinking about those fingers wrinkling the hem of your skirt or shirt or drumming between your hipbones and he won’t catch you blushing.

That way, when Wilson or Cameron asks or insinuates that you’ve slept with him, you’ll be able to produce a firm No, not because you’re particularly exceptional at deception, but because you’ll want that to be the truth because he can’t possibly be good in bed.

You realize this last one to be a fallacious assumption when he’s walking you backward towards his bedroom and you try to open your eyes to see if that’s really House’s mouth doing those things to yours, but there’s only a bluish blur, so you give up.

You realize you’re in trouble, but only fleetingly.

You get a little urgent once he’s sitting on the edge of the bed and you’re standing in front of him, and you know the instant he realizes it because he gets that look in his eye.

Gotcha.

You want to kill him, actually kill him, when he snags both of your wrists in one hand and holds them at your side half-behind you, then pins you between his knees and deliberately, agonizingly, slowly slides his palm up your stomach and under your sweater (you can’t see to enjoy the image of the cashmere rucked on his wrist but you don’t care that much).

But he underestimates you, underestimates the exquisite strain of all this time wanting him.

When you eventually collapse against him, you both land on the bed with a lurch of the springs, and he laughs. You laugh too, around the pressure knotted in your chest.

You’re fumbling with his zipper and he’s smoothing the prickling skin on your back in slow circles when he whispers throatily into your ear canal that it isn’t a race, and he’d hate to have to hold you down.

You know you’ll make him forget that when you win the tug of war with the zipper and brace your knees on either side of his hips.

You don’t—can’t—want a seduction. You don’t—can’t—want tenderness. You don’t—can’t—want more.

You want—just—to open the valve and release the pressure, once.



Him

It’s not healthy, and you’re a doctor, so you’d know.

It’s not healthy to want her and to hate her.

It’s not healthy to not want her to shut up on her own so you can do it yourself, or to want to yank her backwards by that pretentious little hair clip to kiss her while you hurt her, or to want to piss her off for no other reason that she’ll scream back and then you can see some of your thoughts running behind her blue eyes, too.

None of it is healthy. Her beloved Oprah would be appalled, but then, your Luke and Laura wouldn’t care.

And look how well things worked out for them.

So you don’t care.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll cave first—in fact, it assures you won’t.

You need her to not care, too.

She doesn’t, apparently, when you open your apartment door and she walks right into your mouth, trying to talk between oral assaults about “adults” and “valves” and “release” and “one time.”

You hear these fragments through the ring of astonishment in your ears, and you put a stop to it by throwing your cane to the wayside and leaning completely into her, the pressure of your mouth on hers and your arms around her body enough to shut her up.

She wouldn’t come looking for anything, because she was smarter than that.

Which is why you don’t waste any time.

As best you can manage to walk while leaning only on her, you back her blindly down the hall. Your mind is miraculously not focused on your screaming thigh but on the tightness that’s running from the arches of your feet to your throat (but is especially concentrated directly below your suddenly-too-tight belt) and has to be resolved before you snap in two.

It isn’t until you realize what she was babbling about and is now breathily moaning about—“Just once”—that you put the brakes on.

Because you know even if this is the only time this happens, you’re going to wish for it later, so damn it…so will she.

You’ve never been given such a hateful look as the one she gives you when you have her hands, and the fact that it spikes your already sharply-downward-driving pulse is just another severely unhealthy thing to add to your list.

You want her to hate you. You want that pressure of the violently clashing want-and-hate to build up inside her so it’s painful, just like it is for you.

And you laugh when you’re on your back, and when she does too, you know she’s there.

So you tease her about seduction, and she surrounds you with a practically painful pressure—for her as much as you, you imagine--to shut you up, and it works.

The dead weight of her on top of you—after—is barely noticeable, you feel so light, so empty, so relieved.

Drawing a finger up her spine, you enjoy the sensation of her damp skin and the knowledge that you’re responsible for this undoing.

She very seriously—as much as she could muster with her face crushed into the hollow of your neck—reiterates that this was a one-time thing.

You smile, and she probably thinks it’s because you’re happy she’s not going to get clingy or expectant of you.

Really, it’s because you’re thinking she’s an idiot if she really believes what she’s saying.

This isn’t the kind of thing that goes away after just one time. In fact, you can already faintly feel the pressure building again, and you’ll do everything you can to make sure she feels it, too.