a song always says...whatever

"I said, I always want to kiss you. In my brutal subconscious fantasy about going through opioid withdrawal."

All the right details. All the cohesive pacing. All the tiny ways in which she could save him from himself.

Now, House could have said, I boned you doggy style and it felt so good I stopped thinking about my leg for forty-eight straight hours, but he didn't.

Maybe he implied it, instead.

"Are you saying it's just about chemistry?"

Well, obviously. And also, yes - oxytocin and endorphins, great little metal group, you may have heard of them and their hit single Genital Sneeze.

"Lisa."

"Greg."

(It was a confirmation. It was a question.)

"I hate people. I hate needing people. I hate living in a world where people need to need each other - where everyone's constantly suckling at the teat of human forgiveness, thinking they have even an iota of a idea how soft and hypocritical they look as they're doing it."

A hard swallow, the kind that comes with a reflexive breath and a jaw crack, an attempted equilibrium of the ears. A few blinks. The bland and mild comfort of middle distance, sharpening with malleable threat.

"But even I know," House started, pausing to pass his cane from hand to hand because it was a socially acceptable way of playing with himself, "that there will come a point when I have to say, I need you."

This was where the grizzly shelf of brow began to lift, trajectory mounted toward square jaw and shiny-smooth blow-dried hair.

I need you. I did need you. I need you now like I needed you then.

"And as much as I might torture you, day in and day out, putting so much thought into it that it looks like willful negligence...you didn't leave me."

Perpetual pinpoints, constricted in a way inalienable from, yes, the Vicodin, but also from House's very transparent affect itself.

If there ever had been a difference, it was gone now. But Lisa Cuddy, endocrinology auditor, was pretty sure there hadn't.

Pale blue eyes, the kind that real eyes realize.

Contact.

"You stayed."

On the couch. On the rug. On the cold tile floor.

"That's right."

"I always want you. I always want to want you. I...never want to need you like that. But I do."

When House smiled out of a genuine mental movement, and not merely a machination or a petulantly patterned force of expression, there were always two segments to it. First, the imperceptible purse, lips rolling inward as an anacrusis of realization, resignation. The tiniest prick, the way a magician mimes that he's threaded the needle. This was the setup. Then, the sideways stretch, the puff of air, parallel to a downward-sidelong slant of eyes.

A private moment. A retold joke. A Rubix cube three perfect steps from solution - the animant cadence of resolution, suspended forever and so much more satisfactory that way.

Those smiles, impossible enough to believe, were also impossible not to believe. This series of short sentences - four at a time, when the record was usually two at most, before the vaunted arrival of the corresponding upward-sidelong shift of focus depth accompanied by a shallow sigh - made Cuddy wince, reshape her own perpetually-arched socket of left eye.

"I wish I could pretend that I always knew that, exactly. Consciously. It's not like I've always been attracted by your irresistible air of juvenalia."

Graduating high school. Repeating eighth grade.

Two middle-aged individuals with terminal degrees, one consumed by the zeitgeist of sex but almost sexless in appearance and the other a person to whom sex is merely repeatedly, wantonly, incessantly ascribed. That is the reality of the relationship, its timeless players.

But House is a unicorn in the palette of a donkey, and vice versa, because he remains mysteriously adjacent, aloof, to reality.

The monster trucks, the flame decals, the not-so-subtly orthotic running shoes, the jumbo tennis ball, the theatrical rhythm of sarcasm broken by shockingly unguarded giggles about vagina this and innuendo that...

(A jazz pianist, or its unpleasant sibling spoonerism referring to the essential function of a man's primary sexual organ when he is expressly disinterested in procreation. The relentless self-professed gimpy cripple whose axial and appendicular trunkless torso are worthy of being sculpted if not suitable to do the sculpting.)

All of it, perfectly incongruous with a fit, cultured, ruthless hospital higher-up. All of it, aftershocks rippling away from the bumpy, knotty lurch in his thigh.

All of these things, a quirky corral of traits and habits that have been no less than masterfully designed to push away anyone with an idealized self-concept.

But who else would come with gentle hands and ginger tea as grimly adjusted to House's spiraling unreality as even he could stand himself to be?

(Not just gentle hands: kind hands, capable hands. The hands of a nurse, in this moment, more than the fine-tuned tendons of a powerful, effective, regimented administrative doctor.)

Who else would remain, year over year, to want to be kissed? Who else would stay installed there?

To always want to be chased, sparred, foreplayed, because nothing will ever be as strange and strangely attractive as this?

If House said, it's you, Lisa, it's always been you, she'd click her tongue for a beat and wait for the ensuing grotesque mug, gyroscopic eyes prisoner to gawking neck.

But he wouldn't say that, and she doesn't want him to. She doesn't need him like that. She just wants to be inside his mind.

(She doesn't want him to because he can't.)

Well, no. Of course she doesn't. No one could. Even he can barely manage it.

"So you have always been attracted?"

It's a question. It's a confirmation.

More importantly than that, it's not just setup for payoff, not just one beat in a pithy preordained play-by-play.

Information is power, one piece at a time.

"Yes. To something. Maybe not in the way you want. But I'm not above admitting that there's...just something about you."

A man to whom everyone else's needs are brilliantly clearfaced, but to whom his own needs are completely inscrutable.

There's just something about breathing.

Air goes in. Air goes out.

Who can say why?