A/N: I've never really tried my hand at writing live-action before, and it was surprisingly difficult. I haven't had any time to edit or revise this piece, so it's very raw and I'm pretty displeased with it. I'll probably re-read it a month from now and get all embarrassed and take it down. So. Take advantage of a limited-time offer.
Disclaimer: Sure, I own House. (Everybody lies.)

Wednesday's Child
By Secondhand Ragdoll

Monday's child is fair of face
Tuesday's child is full of grace
Wednesday's child is full of woe
Thursday's child has far to go

Act I

His hands were shaking, and when he heard the knock he spilt sugar over the countertop. The grains lay there on the veined soapstone like lace cast faintly blue in the light of the oven clock as he balled up his fists against the counter and closed his eyes and waited for the sickness to pass. After a moment he took the towel around his neck and slid it off and wiped his palms with it and then got his cane from where it was leaning against the cupboards and limped to the door.

"Secret password?" he said, leaning his forehead against the jamb.

"If you let me in, you won't have to pay for the door I'm about to break down."

"I have renter's insurance," he said. "Go away."

"I've got Maker's Mark."

A beat passed in perfect silence. The whitewash paint on the jamb was cool against his skin. At last he undid the chainlock and turned and made his way back into the kitchen. "It's open," he said. He looked up when she came in, her hair loose and tumbling down over her back. "Cuddy should have sent Foreman," he said. "At least he could have picked the lock."

"Cuddy didn't send me." Cameron slid her rucksack off her shoulder and let it down. "Why is it so dark in here?"

"Because the lights are off," he said. He took a tin cup and began to measure out the sugar again. "You were smarter when you worked for me."

"You know what I meant." She came over and picked up a pot off the counter. "What is this?" She dipped her finger inside and lifted it out and said, "What the hell is this?"

"Cake," he said. "I'm getting in touch with my feminine side."

"House."

He took the pot from her. "Thirteen would have believed it."

"What is it really?"

He set the pot down. "Mash," he said. "It's a still."

"A still?"

He looked over at her. "You were smarter when you worked for me."

"You're making moonshine."

He stopped measuring and raised an eyebrow. "I take it back. You get to go to the head of the class."

"Homemade distilleries are illegal."

"I know. I blame Marilyn Manson."

"I'd heard Cuddy cut you off again."

"You'd think she would know better by now," he said, opening a paper sack of corn meal on the counter. "Wouldn't you?"

"House," she said. She grabbed his wrist. "This has got to stop."

He looked down at her through his eyelashes. His lids were heavy and tinged with red, but the irises were clear. Calculating. "How did you get here?" he asked. There was an impression in his brow that meant his mind was turning over. "Did you walk?"

"I took a cab," she said. In the flush of the city lights that came in through the window he could see the color rise in her cheeks. She let go of his wrist but the charge in the air remained. "Why?"

"Did you take the stairs?"

"Elevator. House?"

"There's an artery in the thumb," he said. He folded the top of the floursack down and pushed it back against the wall. "Called the princeps pollicis artery. It's why they teach you to take a pulse with your first two fingers. Because if you take it with your thumb, you'll feel your own heartbeat."

"Wow," she said. "You should be a doctor."

"Funny thing is, when someone grabs you, you can feel their princeps pollicis artery." She crossed her arms and looked down to the side, away from him.

"Can tell how fast their heart is beating." He turned toward her. "Yours is racing."

She moved a handful of hair out of her face. She would not look at him. "Tachycardia is boring symptom," she said.

"In sick people. You're not sick. Which makes it interesting."

"Don't do this."

"And it's not from exercise. You took the elevator. Which means either this cologne really is as irresistible as the commercials say it is," he said, raising his cuff to his nose and sniffing. "Or…" He looked her up and down and then dropt his arm. "Or you're stoned."

She didn't say anything.

"You're stoned?" he said, raising his eyebrows. She didn't answer. "I hope you brought enough to share at least."

She took a bottle out of her coatpocket and tossed it to him, and he caught it against his stomach.

"This isn't why I came," she said.

House finished chasing down a mouthful with a glass of Bacardi and then put both his hands on the counter behind him and closed his eyes.

"I came because I needed to see you."

"You came because you needed something from me. That's why the Vicodin," he said.

"You think it's a bargaining chip?"

"I don't think anything. It's a bargaining chip."

"Why would I give it to you before I got what I wanted?"

He opened an eye. "Because you're lousy at bargaining."

"Or you're wrong."

"Okay."

She waited a while. At last she said, "Chase proposed to me."

He opened his eyes. In the silence between them, they could hear the tick of the longcase clock in the living room. A siren blipped and then started up close by. He looked away from her and out the window to where the reflection of streetlights glowed in a thin layer of cloud cover. "Congratulations," he said quietly.

She blinked and looked up to the ceiling. He thought she might have been crying. "Is that all?"

"Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"I don't know," she said. She pressed her lips together and then blinked upward again and shook her head a little. "No."

He unhooked his cane from the ovenhandle and said "Sorry," as he limped passed her out of the kitchen. She waited until he had got to the sofa and then she said, "I didn't say yes."

He stopped with his back to her and put his free hand on the couch for support.

"I told him I needed to think."

He bowed his head. "And you came here."

She didn't say anything. He took his cane by the shaft and hitched it up in his hand and dropped it and hitched it up again and dropped it again as he thought.

"You didn't call here," he said. "You came. In person."

"I told you I had to see you."

"And you brought painkillers."

"Cuddy--"

He turned around. "Yeah, Cuddy cut me off. Last time I checked, you were on that bandwagon. So what changed?"

She was quiet.

"You didn't need to see me," he said. "You came looking for something." He was watching her now with his head tilted back. The fine crowsfeet at the edges of his eyes slightly crinkled as he took her in. There was something aching in his expression.

"You needed to know if you still had feelings for me."

The space between them seemed to go on forever. It took up all the room in the apartment.

"Yes," she whispered.

A beat. "Do you?'

She crossed to him with her eyes darting over his face, and he watched her without moving. "I don't know," she said. She stopped close enough that he could smell the scent of her, as if it were one of the fibres loomed into the cloth of her shirt. He knew it well enough---the memory of it always stayed long after the rest of her had gone.

She reached up a hand. Her fingers felt cold against his cheek. He watched her. "I don't know," she whispered. She moved her thumb over his mouth. Her eyes flickered up to his and then down again and she leant forward and pressed her lips against his. He hadn't shaved in a while and his jaw was stubbled, coarse. After a moment she pulled away.

"You should go," he said coldly. "Before you make an even bigger fool of yourself." Her hand was still on the back of his neck. His skin felt like it was burning.

"You didn't try to stop me," she said.

"I know." He raised his eyebrows. "Must be high."

She held his gaze firmly, her hands on the yoke of his shirt, fingering the corners of his collar. Her irises were dark, wideopen, and in them he could tell the exact moment that her walls collapsed. She kept his stare as she began to unbutton his shirt, and when it was open she stripped it away from his shoulders so that it hung by its shirtsleeves. She began to kiss him again. His throat and the hingepoint of his jaw and the corner of his mouth. She touched the waistband of his jeans and then his hand was suddenly over hers. The boyishness in his eyes was gone. There was something hungry there instead.

"Are you sure?" he asked her.

The rush of the medicine in her veins was heady, the fabric of his clothes intoxicating. "Yes," she breathed.

"No backsies," he said. The joke fell flat.

"I want this," she said.

There was a moment of stalemate, like the calm that comes before a storm. Sound and motion were suspended. The second hand of the clock did not tick. The headlights flashing past the window stilled.

And then the dams broke.

Act II

His kiss was violent.

He shook the dress shirt from his elbows and then his hands were on her hips, jerking her close and then running upward to trace over her ribcage. She crossed her arms at the waist and caught the hemline of her top and lifted it off over her head, flinging it away to the side. Before the chiffon had even reached the floor, he had pushed her up against the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of her lungs and then he was kissing the hollow where her collarbones touched, fingering the ridges of her spine. Those spaces he had eyed up when he thought she wasn't watching. He bit into the place where her neck met her shoulder and she took in fistfuls of his T shirt, the muscles of her forearms tightening as she tugged him up against her.

They moved together push and pull through the living room, knocking over the lampshade on the endtable, their feet scattering its shards of broken glass. Lost in feel of the friction between them.

He was hard against the inseam of his jeans by the time they got to the foot of the bed. Later she would not remember if she pressed him backward or if he pulled her down. It felt as though time braked as they fell together to the coverlet, her hands in his hair and his hooked into her beltloops. They hit the mattress hard amidst a groan of bedsprings and she pulled his denims down around his ankles and let him kick them away.

The texture of the cotton quilt was rough. He held the straps of her lace bra in his fists, sliding his hands up and down the bands one, two, three times, before he pushed them off her shoulderblades and ran his fingers across the skin. She sat up and undid the clasp at her back and tossed the bra aside, and for a moment they stayed unmoving in their deadlock. He was lying flat on his back and she straddled him. His chest rose and fell heavily. They were both shaking.

He brushed the backs of his fingers against her breasts with uncharacteristic gentleness, rubbing her nipples with the ball of his thumb, and her breath hitched up in her throat. "House," she whispered. He was watching her as he unsnapped her pants and slid them down. His fingers hooked the elastic of her underwear and pared the fabric away. She closed her eyes.

She was more fineboned than he had imagined those times he sat in his office with his feet up on his desk, flipping a coin from knuckle to knuckle and watching her move behind the glass. Her skin looked like china. He felt like he could break her.

The thought exhilarated him.

He took off his boxerbriefs and let them fall to the floor with the rest of their castaway clothes. She opened her eyes.

He said, "I don't love you."

She said, "You're lying."

He said, "I know."

Act III

When he woke, she was dressing in the cool light of the morning. He lay awake amidst sheets that would smell like her long after the rest of her had gone, and he watched her bunch her hair away from her neck. She sat down at the edge of the bed, the ridge of her spine rippling as she bent forward to lace her shoes. If he reached out, he thought he could touch her skin.

He knew what would happen if he did.

Backs arching.

Muscles gathering.

Fingers clutching.

He would put the heel of his palm between her teeth when she came. She would bite down hard enough to draw blood. The world would turn white when he climaxed. They would collapse together. He would take the hair away from her face and watch her sleep. When she woke, he would tell her not to marry Chase.

She would not marry Chase.

He didn't move.

He thought he saw her touch the corner of her eye, and then she put her hands on the mattress and pushed herself to her feet and she was was standing. He listened to the crunch of ceramic beneath her heels as she left the room. He listened to the sound of it breaking. It was something that he had heard before. He heard the doorknob turn. He heard the door fall shut behind her. It was something that he had heard before.

He closed his eyes.

Outside, it had begun to rain.

A/N: It all began with "No More Mr. Nice Guy," which kicked every Hameron fan's imagination into overdrive. Everybody wanted to know when House and Cameron had sex. This is sort of a missing scene from season four, I guess. I'm toying with the idea of turning it into a three- or four-part story, but I feel like this is a weak opening chapter.

Anyway. Happy Thanksgiving---The holiday when Americans celebrate the day the Indians took forty seconds to review the Pilgrims' FanFiction stories and made the Pilrims very very happy.