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“You’ve been with Stacy how long, and you’ve still got your own place?” Wilson’s voice is molasses down the phone, using up airspace. He’s just finished a long day at New York Mercy, calling House from the payphone outside of the hospital; House recognizes the number, now. Recognizes the Brooklyn street sounds backing the voice of the guy he’d call his best friend, several years post-drunk tank. Despite the 90s having passed the midpoint, hurtling them towards a dull new millennium, Wilson still doesn’t have a cell.
“D’you ever wonder how you’re already divorced, and I’m not?” House immediately fires back. “Just because you and Sam were U-Haul lesbians doesn’t mean I have to be. And anyway, depends on how you’re counting.”
“Off-again?” Wilson pries. “Is that why you invited me down there this weekend?”
“No, I invited you because I need an excuse not to go to this conference in Providence. Keep up.” House resists the urge to twirl the cord of his office phone around his fingers like a teenaged girl. Again, despite the zeitgeist, PPTH has not yet gone cordless. “Are you still coming, then?”
“Of course.” The words are worn soft at the edges, open and warm. God, sometimes House can’t bear it, the sincerity. It always comes out of nowhere, often when Wilson’s tired, which doesn’t make much sense, House being the type to be even more abrasive when he’s worn out. “I’m thinking I might go home and grab my bag and then head down to the subway.”
“It’s almost eight, will you make it on time?”
“It’ll be fine, I’ll be quick.”
“You could just wait until the morning, like a normal person.”
“Are you saying you won’t come and pick me up, Greg?”
“Ugh,” he says, the way he always does when Wilson calls him by his first name, because of the way it makes him feel, because of how raw it always sounds.
“Don’t ‘ugh’ me. I can call you Greg, you’re single right now,” Wilson goads. “So will you?”
“Why the hurry? Are the cops finally coming for you? Should I earmark cash for another bailout?”
“Yes, and I’m crossing state lines, to boot. It’ll be a big one.” He sighs, harsh enough that House can almost hallucinate hot breath against his ear. “Come on. We can sleep in, go for breakfast in the morning.”
“It’ll be midnight,” House grumbles, even though he doesn’t care and would probably be up anyway. For reasons he’s afraid to examine, some part of him needs Wilson to feel like a pain in his ass. Like a normal guy-friend. “I guess it’s fine. That pub we always go to has started doing brunch.”
“Ooh, brunch, you spoil me,” Wilson dithers, putting on false airs. House snorts despite himself, alarmingly close to a giggle.
“Only the best for you, dollface.”
“Damn right, sugar. Okay, I’ll see you in a couple of hours.” A click as the line disconnects. House releases a put-upon sigh into the still of his office.
Jesus, he’s fine. Everything’s fine.
So he and Stacy are more off-again than on-again, lately. So he’s gotten greedier for Wilson’s time, craving these sprawling phone calls, this unearned easiness, so what.
So when he jacks off in the shower, he hallucinates dark hair and long-lashed eyes belonging to one of two people in his mind, and he can never quite control which. Can never decide, either, which of them makes him feel guiltier after he comes.
So what.
Everything’s fine.
*
Wilson’s train blows in on an icy breeze, East Coast winter in full swing. He’s in a sweatshirt under his coat, still stubbornly eschewing a scarf or hat, his cheeks watercolored rose the instant the wind hits them, hurrying out of the station with his shoulders hunched. Wilson’s never handled the cold well, which House has always made fun of him for, given that he never trekked towards warmer regions. NYC, Philly, Montreal: every locale he’s chosen, voluntarily, to live in has seen him catlike with irritation for half the year, overbundled and pouting. Trust Wilson to choose to be inconvenienced for the sake of some sort of identity; House thinks that explains their friendship, too, a lot of the time.
He rolls down the passenger window of his car and shouts, “How much for a blowie?”
“Shut up,” Wilson chokes out, flushing but on the verge of laughter, attempting to make himself look very serious.
“Sorry, did you say ‘five?’ Surely you’re worth more than that.”
“Shut up,” Wilson repeats, his voice cracking this time, spilling into an annoyed laugh as he huddles in the passenger’s seat, stabbing at the window controls, desperate to shut himself off from the wind. House fights back with his own buttons from the other side of the vehicle just to be an asshole until someone behind him starts honking, annoyed that he’s taking up curb space. “Have you just come from the hospital?” Wilson asks as they pull away, his eyes pinned on House.
“Huh? No, it’s past midnight, what do you take me for?”
“So then you got all dressed up just for me?” House coughs. He’s still in his dress shirt. Okay, he had taken it off when he got home and then put it on again to go pick up Wilson, so what?! “Aww. You don’t have to do all that, this is hardly our first sleepover.”
“I didn’t feel like getting undressed,” House says, perhaps more snippily than the friendly ribbing calls for. “Don’t mountain my molehill.”
“I’m not mountin’ anything of yours, I’m not that kind of girl,” Wilson fires back instantly, and just like that House is laughing again. Like it’s that easy. God, everything is fine.
They go for brunch in the morning, and House makes fun of Wilson for ordering a mimosa, too buzzed on the lazy comfort of this day to overanalyze how much he enjoys the way Wilson’s features are set when he’s tipsy. His lashes heavier, face a little flushed, his smile looser and easier. Oh, the gall House even has to notice these things, to constantly be assigning weight to the minutiae of his best friend: pure greed, that’s what it is.
He can be greedy, he decides. He’s earned it. It’s silent, this greed, unobtrusive to anyone except for House, his own private misery, and so what’s the problem? It lives between the tiles of the bathroom shower, where his eyes lock, unfocused, thinking of dark hair and wry mouths, the flash of a watch, a necklace. So long as it stays there, everything’s fine, or else.
He steals the last bite of Wilson’s French toast off his plate, not thinking about syrup clinging sticky to tongues, not thinking about anything whatsoever. It’s easy, around Wilson, not to think at all. Easier than Stacy.
Not that he’s comparing.
But it’s harder, too, in other ways. Hard to guard the more abrasive, touchy parts of himself. With Stacy, he can summon the will to be better than he is to others, to be gentle, even doting at times—with Wilson, not so much. Due, in large part, to how much Wilson seems to like it when he’s horrible.
Afterwards, a little too buzzed off breakfast cocktails to drive, they wander around downtown Princeton for a bit, stumbling into a sad little flea market in one alley, jostling one another on the sidewalk. It makes House feel younger, somehow, the wandering on foot. Like he’s someone who could’ve known Wilson when they were younger and been half as liked. He doesn’t think he could stand it—Wilson before Sam, before he gained that bitter, angry edge that only leaves him in ill-fated explosions once in a blue moon. Divorce made him interesting.
Interesting, House tells himself, trying to wall away his notice—he’s hunched again, puffed like a bird against the hated cold, occasionally holding parts of his scarf against his face before his hands get too cold and he returns them into his pockets, and House notices, but it’s only because he’s interesting.
They wind their way past vendor stalls, spilling toward the opposite end of the alleyway, where a kid takes one look at House and tries to sell him weed. Talk about things that make him feel freshly young, before the doldrums of medical school had dragged away any remaining softness on his bones. Whatever the case, he can just tell at a glance that the shit’s chock full of stems. “I’m not dumb enough to pay that much for your lawn clippings,” he tells the kid, “but try the guy behind me.”
“I may be dumb, but I’m smart enough to follow your example, sweetheart,” Wilson says with false sweetness. Ah. Getting back at him by pretending to be gay. This is one of the things House finds interesting about Wilson: his willingness to fling shit straight back at House despite his seemingly-sweet exterior. And it’s the Bloody Mary doing flips in his stomach, hallucinating a maple syrup film across his molars. If anyone asks. Wilson laces his hand through House’s elbow, giving the kid a falsely-vapid smile, and House scoffs loudly, leaning fully into the joke and wrapping an arm around Wilson’s waist. There is something to be said for Wilson’s life settling down, House thinks, now that he’s doing his oncology residency, a softness settling around the parts of him that taper.
Interesting. That’s all.
“My stuff’s good, man,” the kid insists, but he’s already scoping the loitering crowd for another mark. “You don’t know shit, that’s not my problem.”
“The stuff in the bottom of my grinder is worth more than that,” House says. “And I dropped it on my bathroom floor.”
“Whatever, bitchass.” Wilson doubles a bit, snorting tipsily, as a result leaning more fully, dizzyingly, against House, and he almost forgets to be angry.
Almost. Wilson can tell he’s about to raise his voice and yell to anyone in their vicinity that this kid’s weed will make them shit liquid, and he quickly tugs House down the sidewalk, with it enough not to want to deal with humiliation by proxy.
Later, in the car, sobered enough to face the slushy streets, Wilson says, “Didja really drop it on the bathroom floor?” It’s one of those casual Wilson statements that has actually been ponderously mulled over throughout the minutes since, designed to mollify a person into telling him what he wants to know without showing he wants to know it. It drives House crazy.
“Wilson, for fuck’s sake, just ask me if I smoke, you’re not a sorority girl.”
“I would never join a sorority.”
“No, you’d join fucking...rowing or something.” Wilson stares, suddenly intently, at the damp windshield. “Oh my god, you totally did rowing, didn’t you? Where was it? Columbia or McGill?”
“Stop it,” Wilson says, instead of answering.
“Anyway, yes I smoke.”
“Does it actually make that much of a difference where you get it from?” Wilson’s given up on being indirect, definitely just to distract House from the rowing team thing.
“Seriously? Yes, Wilson, it matters.”
“The few times I’ve tried, it’s never done anything,” Wilson laments. “I think maybe it’s just not for me. I’ll bet they’ll find there’s a genetic component or something.”
“Oh, bullshit.” House shakes his head. “You’re totally the type to do a half-assed puff and just pretend like you’ve been smoking while everyone else gets too stoned to notice.”
“I’m—I am not!”
“You so are! You’re a control freak, Jimmy, that’s just a fact. You hate the idea of letting loose.”
“I’m letting loose right now!”
“You—mimosas? That’s your idea of letting loose, a cocktail with no hard liquor that grannies order at brunch. Scratch that, I’ve met grannies who’d smoke you under the table.”
“I smoked—I did it normally, like everyone else, and it just didn’t do anything. I think I just don’t feel it,” Wilson insists. “I feel maybe a little more relaxed, but nothing else—”
“Assuming that’s even slightly true, that just means you had shit weed, then. You, James Wilson, would be an absolute wreck on proper marijuana.”
“You have no way of knowing that! Metabolisms differ, and—”
“Of course I do, I know you. You’re just the type.”
“That’s not a—you can’t know that.”
“If there’s a gene for how stoned you get, there’s probably a gene for knowing how stoned someone would get just by looking at them.”
“And you’re saying you have it.”
“Yes.” They’ve arrived at House’s apartment building now, and he’s emphatic as he puts the car in park, turning in his seat to look at Wilson, who has already turned in his seat to look at House. “Never been wrong, not once.”
“Uh-huh.” Wilson settles back into his seat with false ease, his eyes saying, come on. Say it.
House is gonna say it. “I’ll prove it to you, right now. I’ll smoke you out properly, and we’ll see which of us is right.”
“What do I get if I win?”
“It’s not a bet, Jimmy, it’s—it’s a dare. If you’re too much of a pussy, then—”
“I didn’t say that. I just think it’s going to be hilarious when you get absolutely inebriated and I’m sitting there still sober. I guess what I get if I win is that I’ll get to hold it against you, hm?”
“Hey. Careful what you hold against me, pal, you might not get it back.” House wiggles his eyebrows lasciviously and exits the vehicle, leaving Wilson sputtering as he tries to untangle innuendo from threat, inasmuch as that’s possible.
House goes straight for his grinder as they enter the apartment, idly following the sounds of Wilson dismantling behind him: shoes by the door, coat slipping off his shoulders, the labored exhale as he unwinds his scarf, the weight of House’s notice doing laps around his own head. Racking up interest he’ll feel later like a punch to the gut, once Wilson goes home and there’s nowhere to aim it.
“How didn’t I know this about you,” Wilson muses, and House returns to himself to find he’s already broken up the flower into manageable chunks, his fingertips sticky. “After how many years of friendship?”
“You don’t know everything about me. I’m an endless mystery,” House tells him.
“Hmm. That’s what you think,” Wilson says, in a falsely-creepy tone of voice. House lurches inwardly, realizing he wouldn’t mind Wilson doing a lot of things other people would consider invasive. He would be open to being stalked. He blinks and finds he’s finished grinding the weed, his hands having galloped ahead while his mind was in the crab-bucket, pulling itself down.
“Show me how you do it,” Wilson says, suddenly at his elbow, and House very nearly fumbles the grinder, managing in the end to spill only a few crumbs of the stuff to the carpet. He’ll clean it up later. “Maybe it’s my technique that’s been lacking.”
“If you can smoke a cigarette, you can smoke a joint,” House mumbles, not entirely sure if that’s making sense. Wilson is so warm and boy-shaped in his periphery that it’s a little hard to keep track of the brain-to-mouth pipeline, vodka-slippery and wanting as he is. “But that’s not my speed.” From the box on the bookshelf, he furnishes a nice piece of glassware, nothing fancy, no water chamber or anything, but it’s a decent pipe, a good enough thing to pack full and breathe deep off of.
A smudge of Stacy’s lipstick remains on the stem, and he tries to be subtle about buffing it off with his sleeve. But now it’s on his sleeve, and he guesses he’ll just have to live with that, and he packs the bowl, even taking a moment to pull the finer crumbs of waxy top-tier shit off the mesh filter at the bottom of the grinder, which he almost never checks. They garnish the setup almost accusingly, sparkling up at him as if to say Are you really going to do this?
Yes, and with his whole chest. Not getting hung up on the way Wilson’s been watching his hands intently, as if he’s already stoned, as if House isn’t the only one who’s caught. “You got a lighter?” House asks. Wilson does. “Do you even smoke cigarettes, Wilson?”
“No. I mean, sometimes. I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t—what does that mean?”
“The nurses do,” Wilson says, almost bashfully, flipping the top off.
“Oh, the nurses do. And how convenient that Dr. Wilson is in the alley to light it for them.”
“Aren’t you a lucky nurse,” Wilson says, getting his bite back, batting his eyelashes at House, who makes a noise of disgust and beckons him to hurry up and light the thing.
“Hold it to the top of it—not that close—” House covers the carb quickly, inhaling a bit and then beckoning Wilson to back off with the lighter as he lets the air in. “See how I did that? You gotta cover—” He coughs. In front of Wilson. So what! “—cover the hole. For a second, until you—just for a couple seconds.”
“Okay.” Wilson’s looking at him with that keen stare, like he’s a little kid watching someone do a handstand for the first time. House can’t stand it.
“Okay. Now, you—here.” House hands him the thing, and Wilson looks at him a bit starrily, like he almost wasn’t expecting to actually do this, and then puts his mouth on it. Don’t think about it. “Hang on, Wilson, the hole—” After some fumbling and a little laughter, House ends up handling the carb, Wilson either too nervous or too clumsy to focus on multiple new things at once. The glass has warmed by now, from smoke and fingerprints, skin temperature, House’s fingertips close to Wilson’s jaw as he inhales, almost cross-eyed towards the flame. House could just about die, to be honest.
A moment, and then Wilson pulls off, exhaling a raspy hhughh sound that quickly turns into a cough. House laughs and laughs, his best friend’s face apple-pink in the gray winter light, laughs too hard for the situation, not even stoned enough to justify it yet, just—oh, Wilson.
He and Stacy nestle side-by-side in the same spot in House’s chest now, aching all around from laughter and weed smoke, and he’s too far gone to kid himself about what in the hell that means.
“That is so much worse than a joint,” Wilson strains, clearing his throat like an old man afterwards. It absolutely isn’t, but House lets it go.
“I still don’t believe you were actually smoking them,” House manages, once he gets hold of himself. Snatches the lighter from Wilson’s hand and takes another hit, needing it sorely. “C’mon, sit down,” he says, smoke curling off his tongue. “You’ll get used to it, but if you keep coughing like that, you’ll get dizzy and fall over.”
“Again?!” Wilson expels, sounding a little horrified and a little excited.
“What do you mean again? You have to do it again, you can’t—well, maybe you could get stoned off one hit, but you don’t—it’s called smoking a bowl, Wilson. Smoking a joint. As in, the whole thing, or like half of it. Did you—have you always just taken one hit and expected to get stoned?”
“No!” Wilson plops down beside him on the couch, sitting on his hands in a way House should not find so adorable, looking at the stem of the pipe, and House’s fingers on it. “No, I just—I was just—shut up.”
“Christ, you’re killing me,” House mutters.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just—” He gestures with the pipe until Wilson, inexplicably, leans in to put his mouth around the mouthpiece without actually taking it out of House’s grip. Expecting House to do the carb for him, the big baby. House’s mind is entering its own red light district. He shakes it off, lighting Wilson up again—oh, he’s in a mean mood, following Wilson when he goes to pull off. “It’s still lit, don’t waste that smoke, you baby,” House scolds. Wilson’s eyes are blown wide and wet and dark as he tries to be polite and actually make the most of this hit, waiting until House lets him up.
Stop it.
“Okay,” Wilson gasps wetly, a moment later. “Mmkay. Yeah, I’m getting a little used to it, I think.”
“Good.” House abruptly breaks away, staring up at the ceiling and inwardly shaking himself by the neck. What is wrong with you. “Catch your breath for a sec, and then I think one more oughta do you.”
“I think I’m already,” Wilson says.
“Already what?”
“Just—I don’t. I think I am. Stoned,” he says, snippily, like a man trying very hard to sound sober. House is laughing again, around the hot stone in the middle of his chest that shows up whenever he thinks of Wilson too much, whenever he finds one of Stacy’s hair ties laying around the house. Off-again, indeed.
“I forgot you had that mimosa, too,” House says, with faux sympathy, meant to make fun of the mimosa again. Wilson, though, bobs his head woozily as if taking House incredibly seriously. “Oh, Jimmy, I think you might be.”
“Might be what?” Wilson looks a bit dizzy as he watches House pick up the lighter. “I can do three,” he adds. “If you’re—we can be even, you know.” House hums to himself, pondering what remains in the bowl. It’s a small pipe, not to mention it’d still been burning after Wilson’s first.
“I dunno if there’s two more left.”
“Share,” Wilson says.
“Huh?”
“You can shotgun it.” His mind turns into one of those water wiggler thingies, turning inside out forever. “I don’t mind.”
“You don’t mind? Way to make a guy feel special.” Thank god he’s been smoking, not that there would’ve been a squeak in his voice just then, but if there would have been, the smoke would’ve roughened it out. “How do you know what that is?!”
“I smoke cigarettes,” Wilson insists, “sometimes!”
“Wilson.” House flips the lighter cap in his hand restlessly. Wait a second. Wait just a—
“Come on,” Wilson whines, and then he gives House this fucking. Look. Sultry and so pointed that House almost misses the tiny bit of poise that tells him this is a thing Wilson has practiced.
“If you want to kiss me that bad you’ll have to do it yourself,” he says, and he’d argue it’s more feisty than bitter but maybe it doesn’t matter, the weed already creeping across the moment, softening everything.
“I never said I would kiss you,” Wilson says, but in the pause House also hears that he never said he wouldn’t. “Just...sharing.”
“They do say it’s caring,” House mutters. Fuck. He cannot be sweating, on the palms, when it’s this cold outside, and yet. He’s still firm enough to hold the pipe, the lighter, to man the carb as he takes the last pull, tasting on the last notes that this is indeed the last good part of this bowl. Not quite the last, actually: sharing. Here’s Wilson, looking at him with inordinate softness, already sitting far closer than he probably should be: what’s this. What’s another inch. What’s the millimeter of air that cushions his brain’s last bit of denial: it’s not skin-on-skin—what’s a little sharing between friends?
Wilson’s hand cupping his cheekbone with a carefulness bordering on tender—House wants to bite, to rip and tear, but he’s defanged, a defenseless animal hugging its precious corner as Wilson breathes in the breath that House breathes out. When had his hand—sleeve still lipsticked, courtesy of Stacy’s ever-lingering memory—crept up to grasp Wilson’s wrist, the lighter dropped carelessly, noticed only in past tense?
He’s pretty sure shotgunning doesn’t involve still being there, hovering, suspended, while the receiver breathes out. There is nothing to be gained from a second pass, and yet he takes it, if only for plausible deniability. This close, Wilson’s eyes are doubled-over rings of living earth, and House. House is high.
For one brilliant moment, he thinks Wilson’s actually going to do it—going to kiss him. And House had meant it, stoned and stubbornly, when he said Wilson would have to be the one to go for it first. (He would, if Wilson asked him. He would do a lot of things just because Wilson asked.) And then Wilson ducks away, his hand slipping down from House’s cheek to his shoulder, curled almost daintily as he giggles into the chill of the living room. Laughter, aerated as an unseasonable mimosa. “Whoa,” Wilson whispers. “Okay. I get it now.”
“Yeah?” Despite himself, despite hating the almost he was just a part of, House laughs, too. Wilson tips his head back, his throat a supple line bowed towards the ceiling as he blinks, reminding House for a moment of a calf from a nature documentary. Heavy-lashed and wet-eyed, too soft for the world. “How’s that tolerance level treating you, bud?” Some people can say bud the same way they might say babe, and this is how House accidentally finds out he’s one of them. “Doing okay?”
“I’m doing, yeah.”
“You’re ‘doing yeah?’”
“I’m...I don’t know. I think so.”
“Wilson,” he says, and then breaks into laughter for a breathless second, impulsively turning on the couch, flopping his legs over Wilson’s. They just shotgunned weed, he thinks their fragile veil of heterosexuality can handle this. And if it can’t—oh well. “You’re not making any sense.”
“I make perfect sense,” Wilson insists, raising his head, seemingly with some effort, and squinting at House. House thinks he thinks he’s glaring. “You’re the one who doesn’t make any sense, Gregory House.”
“Don’t say my full name like that, or I’ll get scared,” House complains, leaning his cheek against the back of the couch—against his wrist. The smell of lipstick hits him faintly, that usual plastic-clay smell, hadn’t he kissed it off the last time Stacy smoked here? Hadn’t he ever managed, once, to think of one of them without the other? “Wilson.”
“What?”
“Hmm?”
“You just said my name,” Wilson explains earnestly.
“Oh. It was just to make a point.”
“What was the point that you were making.” He says each word slowly, like he’s trying to remember to say them all in order, and House is so privately delighted by the phenomenon that he almost forgets to answer.
“I don’t know. If you didn’t get it, then it doesn’t matter anyway. Try to keep up, will you?”
“I keep up with you so fine,” Wilson objects.
“You do.”
“Aww.” Wilson absently picks at the side seam of House’s jeans, just below the knee, and he’s suddenly reacquainted with the reality of his calves against Wilson’s thighs, and Wilson letting him be there. “House.”
“What.”
“D’you know what denim is made out of?”
“What?”
“I mean.” He pinches at a crease in said denim, as if he can divine the answer through touch alone—never has House so longed to be a question. “Is it any sort of special type of—of thing? Like, some things are cotton, or polyester—is ‘denim’ a type of...thing you make fabric out of...or is it the fabric?”
“I think it’s the color.”
“But it comes in all different colors.”
“It comes in blue. What are you talking about!”
“That’s not even—I’ve seen jeans in other colors besides blue.”
“Then they weren’t denim!”
“Hhuh.” Wilson utters, then chews at his bottom lip intently. “Mouth feels weird.”
“So does mine, too. It’s just part of it.” Wilson’s eyes flicker unsubtly to said mouth, and House suddenly feels dizzy. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like a slut.”
“What if I am one! So what if I am one. It’s gonna be the year 2000 before you know it, and I can’t be a slut?”
“Wilson!” House groans, looking at the ceiling so he can stop looking at Wilson. As if that’s a thing that’s possible. “Giving me the ‘fuck-me’ eyes was not what I expected out of this smoke session. You are killing me, and you like it! I think you like killing me, and that’s sick.”
“Why.” Wilson’s arm settles over his calves. “I mean—why’s it killing you.”
“I already told you,” he enunciates, “if you want to kiss me, then—” He looks up abruptly, the motion making him feel a bit sloshy about the head, at the feeling of Wilson squirming. It’s awkward, but he wriggles a little closer on the couch, even though it makes House’s legs scrunch up a bit oddly over his. “—then,” House continues. “What’re you doing.”
“Finding out, um—” Wilson manages to get his elbow up, leaning it against the couch’s back, almost sideways, so they’re facing. Indeed, the leg contact is closer to thigh-over-thigh than calf-over-thigh. “Which of us has worse cottonmouth,” he continues. “Empirically.” Of course he’d be the type to say “empirically” even when stoned. Pretentious bastard. House is thinking this, instead of reckoning with the fact that his best friend whom he definitely has a thing for is coming onto him, and thus is shocked silly when Wilson closes the distance between them, consumes that millimeter of dead denial-space that shotgunning left charged with potential. His mouth is soft and wetter than he gives himself credit for, that’s always how it goes, weed and that faint kick of syrup still on his breath, leisurely and needy at the same time. High as a kite, House is. The kiss is messy, untender, a smudging-together of mouths, teeth guarded—at first. House has never been good at guarding his teeth around Wilson. Wilson, who has never voiced it, if he’s minded.
Likes it, the bastard. Likes House too much for House’s own good. He lets his teeth show through, not to erase color like the last time he kissed someone over the barrel of this pipe, but to deposit the flushed bruise rainbow he knows Wilson’s capable of. You know you have a problem—a gay problem—when you have idly considered how well another man would mark up.
He breaks off at the thought, his forehead heavy against Wilson’s as if by some magnetic pull. Slowly the rest of his body pulses into his awareness, their thighs grazing, Wilson’s fingertips hooked in House’s front pocket—so much. Okay. “Wilson.” His mouth brushes the shape of the word against his best friend’s jawline, what is he doing, he will fuck this up and yet he can’t see himself aborting the trajectory. No brakes on this runaway train. “You’re high.” It is the only warning he can stand to give.
“So’re you. House.” That hand detangles from his pocket, rolls itself up to the waist, a spot above the hip that House doesn’t think has ever felt so blazingly warm before now. “That’s not why,” Wilson murmurs. “I just needed the courage.”
Oh. He can’t say things like that. Not when this thing with Stacy has only ever been off-again in a mutually temporary fashion—though, he muses, maybe less because they want it and more because they both know that, at some point, it will become easier to slide together than roll apart. Nothing between them. Theoretically. And then he’s not thinking, again, because Wilson tilts his head like an adoring dog—rests the side of it against House’s arm, still propped on the couch, and how can he do anything but what he’s doing? Is his love life just an exercise in serial inevitability?
He doesn’t mind, he decides, not with Wilson looking at him all gooey, a thing he would swear to his dying day is awful and hateworthy while secretly weak for it. Unable, really, to ever say “no” to Wilson, or to himself where Wilson’s concerned. “Please don’t freak out,” Wilson whispers. “If you want to forget this ever happened—”
“No—” It leaves him in an instinctive rush. “I’m not freaking out.”
“Okay.” Wilson’s hand on his waist is idly fiddling with the fabric of his shirt, too cozy, too familiar, and he wonders if the first time would’ve always felt like this—like it was nothing new, a reality just waiting to be acknowledged. “Then kiss me back, then.”
“You said ‘then’ twice.”
“Shut u—” Wilson exhales the would-be end of that utterance as a breathy hum into House’s mouth, tongue flicking against incisors, and maybe it’s the high but House feels a thrumming in his skull, emanating from where Wilson’s mouth is snared against his, his hair standing on end. There’s a push and pull, palms against ribs and knees against couch—in flashes of movement, Wilson slouches halfway to his back and House wrangles his gawky frame to where he’s straddling instead of sitting sideways, the new wealth of contact sending flickers of warmth up and down his spine. Laughing all the way, breathless and snatched between kisses, and he finally gets to Wilson’s neck while he’s distracted and gets an aah— that he thinks just might ruin pornography for him for awhile. One hand has made its way up under his shirt, searing against the ridge of his hip, and he doesn’t even mind that Wilson’s own hip is compressing his thigh against the back of the couch, he doesn’t care, nothing else matters. Wilson makes another desperate sound, rolling his head, giving House more room. Letting him take, god, that’s what he’s always done.
Given him just enough. Kept him interested. House distantly knows there’re a lot of ways this could go poorly, after today. Doesn’t care. Not when Wilson says “Please—guh, House—” his hands gripping House’s hips, kneading like a cat.
“Please—what?” House is too stoned to be too smug, trying futilely to catch his breath, a difficult feat with so much supple boyflesh sprawled out between his knees. “What do you—where d’you see this going, Jimmy?”
“Not proposing or anything,” Wilson pants after a minute.
“I didn’t—I meant today, idiot. Right now. Stop—stop time traveling.”
“What?” Wilson laughs, rich and breathy, and House can feel it, feel his waist shaking with it, between his thighs. Oh, that’s horrible. “Time traveling? Anyway, I—oh, I just want...anything, c’mon, House. You.”
“Me,” he echoes dumbly.
“Uh-huh. However, I mean, whatever—” He makes a noise, a stoned growl-gasp-whine, as House goes for the neck again, intent on leaving marks. Wilson’s hips squirm under his, a motion that leaves them both shivering like gun-shy dogs for a moment afterwards. Small mercy not to be alone in being wrecked. “Mmhmm,” Wilson continues. “That’s—more of this, whatever, anything.”
“Eloquent,” House says, his head still reeling. “Always grateful for your clarity of vision.”
“Shhhush,” Wilson scolds, arching his neck up, nuzzling, suddenly, into House’s collarbone, reminding him they both have necks and that he, too, is susceptible to attack. “I could do this all day,” Wilson says, his smoked-out throat turning it into a purr that should not be coming from a face so boyish, “just this, if you wanted, if it’s you.” Oh, you can’t say things like that, motherfucker. “Give you whatever you want.”
“Sap,” House manages, after far too long of just trying to get his bearings. “You pillow-talk with all the nurses whose smokes you light?”
“No, babe, just you,” Wilson sighs, like a lovesick fool, and House doesn’t want to think about how badly he wants to believe it. “Can’t get you outta my head….” In case he takes it back when he’s sober, or at all, House hastily shuts him up, kissing the living daylights out of him, impatiently cooperating when Wilson tugs at his shirt, baring his chest to the chill of the room. Nonetheless, he somehow feels overheated, humming low in his throat at the bite of nails through his chest hair, a good reminder that Wilson’s not exactly gentle with him either.
Not with his hands, and not with his eyes either, which look House appreciatively up and down with an admiration that positively scalds. His skin feels champagne-infused, humming with heat, and he grinds down on Wilson in retaliation, giggling too much for the situation at the way it makes Wilson clutch at him. “Rude,” Wilson gasps, and then suddenly the world goes a bit topsy-turvy. House finds himself spilling off the couch, landing with an oof on the carpet between sofa and coffee table, which Wilson is shoving out of the way as he settles smugly between House’s legs.
“Suplexing me and then rearranging my furniture?” House strains. “You really are a charmer, aren’t you?”
“I think having you is better than charming you,” Wilson breathes, which doesn’t make sense except that it does, and he shivers as House claws at his shirts. He’s got on a flannel and a sweatshirt, as if that should look good on anyone, and, worse yet, House finds an undershirt underneath the whole mess, apparently purchased before Wilson gained some weight. Divorced and thirty-something never looked this good, he thinks, leaving the undershirt on, delighting in the upspring of Wilson’s goosebumps, either from the cold or from his touch. “Has anyone ever told you you’re grabbable?”
“Grabbable?” Wilson asks, breaking into laughter, braced on one hand over House, apparenly unwilling to stray too far. “You should do some more grabbing, then.”
“You’re dangerous, Jimmy.”
“Mmhmm.” Wilson does that debutante sigh again as House runs a hand down his spine, nosing lazily at the curve of House’s neck. Anytime he’s imagined this it’s been rushed, sloppy, accelerated with need, and it’s not that he’s any less needy here, but slow and steady feels almost worse somehow. Warm, easy, unhurried, like lasting isn’t a scary thing. Wilson hums in approval when House goes for his fly, their hands briefly tangling as Wilson does the same for him, then House summarily “wins” by cupping Wilson through his underwear. Laughing, again, at the whorish whine the touch inspires, everything heightened by the smoke, by the elation. Wilson’s radiating heat between the legs, his pelvis a hand-shaped trench, baking his knuckles like a kiln. “House, god,” he says. “Let me—hang on, please—”
Waistbands come down on both sides, Wilson quick to lay himself back down again, clearly unhappy about the chill. House selfishly thinks he’ll keep the heat turned down for the rest of this weekend. Wilson grabs one of House’s hands and—licks it, the sensation turning glittery and scattering up his arm thanks to the high, dragging a panicked laugh from him, like a child being tickled. “What are you—! Oh,” he finishes, suddenly realizing, suddenly enjoying, too, the flash of Wilson’s tongue between his fingers. “You want me to—”
“Please,” Wilson breathes, apparently beyond eloquence now, cottonmouth seemingly a concern of the past. Before the saliva can cool too much, House brings the hand down, thigh nudging Wilson halfway to his side, getting to where he can grab both dicks at once. Fuck yeah. How did I get here, he thinks suddenly, then decides it doesn’t matter, not with the way their conjoined groans catch and stick in uneasy harmony at that first touch. “Good hands, you have such good hands,” Wilson mumbles against his collarbone, seeming to alternate going limp and rigid against him, like a heartbeat.
“You’re such a little freak,” House pants, trying to concentrate on working them in a way that feels good.
“Oh, you’ve no idea,” Wilson slurs, and then he closes his hand over House’s, double-wrapping the dick sandwich. A rather visceral image in House’s stoned mind almost makes him burst into laughter, but he manages to recenter. Hard not to come back to this, really, with the liquid glide of skin-on-skin and Wilson’s winter-touched, cologney smell—he had put on cologne this morning, that seems important, but quickly eludes House—with the way Wilson’s letting out little hisses and hums against his skin, kissing him without a hint of caution. Hard not to get stuck here, to feel himself changing forever.
Wilson comes first, his hips jerking—his head thrown back, and House thinks privately that this has to be one of the few things that James Wilson can’t have practiced, when it comes to sex, the way he looks when he comes. Pretty, rigid, weak like a newborn foal. He’s quick to extract his dick from the mess, becoming oversensitive, but replaces House’s hand entirely with his own, watching him almost too closely as he jerks him off. This is bad, House thinks, very bad, and then he comes, one foot kicking against the carpet for some reason, the weed seeming to take the moment and string it out all the way to his fingertips until he thinks it might never end and then it does. And then it doesn’t, because the moment isn’t over, they’re still laying on his carpet covered in one another’s jizz, still stoned, still House and Wilson, but a version of themselves who’ve now had sex.
Okay. So what.
So maybe Wilson will want to forget all of this, and go back up to Brooklyn and call less and less and shack up with some pretty, stupid nurse for another two-year divorce court turnaround. Maybe it will become occasional, a thing they both agree to treat as a repeated lapse into something neither of them really want, and House will go back to Stacy and she’ll notice something is different about him but they won’t talk about it, because that would lead to off-again. Or maybe. Maybe.
Wilson curls towards him, notching his chin into a spot on House’s shoulder, his breath rushing headily over his hyoid bone. House’s palm slots under the neck of his ill-fitting undershirt, and he feels it looming overhead, the way it does with Stacy: the terrible possibility of lasting. The eventual necessity of putting words to a state of being.
He’d move to Brooklyn, if Wilson asked him.
“I like you for real,” Wilson whispers in his ear, like they’re kids under a playground slide, and House can’t help but laugh. Has to, wants to. He’s full up with it, with a reckless kind of joy that almost shocks him. “Sober or otherwise. Don’t laugh at me, I mean it.”
“I know you do.” He’s almost whispering, rolling his shoulder blades downwards for a moment, stretching his spine. Wilson’s fingertips hooked in his beltloop again, like he needs to stay caught on House. “I like you for real, too.” He can’t see, but can feel—can picture—the shape of Wilson’s grin against his collarbone.
Lasting, he thinks, looks pretty good from this angle.