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Fly free, little fic.
Happy birthday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nightdog_barks! I hope it's been a nice one, and here's to having made another year around the sun.
I'd like to give you something, so I'm taking a page from your playbook and sharing a story from my hard drive I'm never going to get around to finishing where I still think you'd enjoy what I managed to write. It's the "Wilson gets a boyfriend" AU I talked about it a little bit here, and these are the 3100-some-odd words of it I managed to write.
1.
James Wilson was six years old the first time he fell in love. He barely knew about the words but if he had, would have used them to describe how he felt that day, from one moment to the next. There was a program his school put on, a big-brother-big-sister arrangement with the sixth graders helping the students in first with their reading, come with them to pick out books in the library, that sort of social exercise. His teacher, one of those kindly old ladies with long silver hair and thin-rimmed glasses to match, sat her students down on the big reading mat in the corner while the sixth-graders came into the room one by one, to stand by the window until their assigned student was called up.
He remembered being excited at the idea, and that he’d fidgeted on the mat until the door opened and everyone started coming in. He’d started to wonder if this one would be his, or the next one or this one. He’d wondered until one of the boy walked in, taller than the rest with light hair and freckles over his face and wearing a jacket, and the moment he saw him Wilson started hoping instead, wishing for the teacher to call both their names. ‘Wilson’ was so far down the alphabet he knew he’d be called almost-last, and wished the boy’s wasn’t called either, hoping so hard he shivered.
The boy’s name, Rick, was called first, and then his came, and he almost jumped up off the rug to run over. Rick smiled and took Jimmy by the hand, walked him to a bench under one of the trees near the school library, and showed him the book he’d brought for the day’s program. It was something about pandas. Wilson didn’t remember much more about it than an illustration of a mother panda and her baby by a river, and that he could already read just fine. All he’d wanted was to sit next to Rick, scoot closer to him and sit in his lap, listen to him read the words and pull the story together.
He read with Jimmy twice a week for four months until school ended, and even after four months Jimmy wasn’t tired of seeing him come into the classroom, running over to say hello, and walking over to a bench or table in the library and doing their reading together. He learned new, hard words like ‘confused’ and ‘beautiful’ and Rick taught him what mammals were and he watched Rick’s cheeks with all their freckles when he bobbed his head over one of the chapter books Jimmy swore he knew how to read because he knew Rick would like that. It never occurred to him to wonder if Rick liked him back the way he liked Rick, and it didn’t matter either. Rick let him sit in his lap sometimes when they read, and that was more than enough.
Right before the school year ended, his teacher had them write cards to their big-brother-big-sister partners to thank them. Jimmy signed his card – thanking Rick for coming over and telling him how much he liked him and how he wished he could see him during the summer – with ‘Love, James’ to show he meant it, the way his mother told him to sign thank-you cards for birthdays.
He didn’t see Rick over the summer, and sixth graders went to the middle school across town anyway, and Jimmy felt like crying when he realized he wouldn’t see Rick again. But it didn’t take him long to forget being sad, or to start enjoying the summer vacation and everything that came to young boys on long summer days.
Over time, he forgot almost everything about Rick, about buying him the green toy horse with his allowance and the exact pattern of his freckles. All he ended up remembering were the feelings when Rick came into his classroom, and how much he wanted to sit next to him and on his lap, his six-year-old’s devotion, forgetting more until he learned to stop being what other people expected him to be.
When he met Rick, he didn’t realize what that moment of falling in love meant, and much later, when he remembered that moment, he had to laugh at how appropriate it was – how never knowing what was happening while it happened seemed to be his life.
2.
If he put his mind to it, Wilson knew he could come up with at least three or four worse poster sessions he’d attended. He might have to go as far back as the fourth grade science fair, but he was certain he could do it. It wasn’t so much that the posters were bad, exactly, so much as it was that this was an oncology conference and he was certain nobody here needed to feel like they were reading an extra-juicy cigarette package’s warning complete with Technicolor lungs. Still, to be fair to the session at large, it gave him enough of an excuse to duck out of the main conference for an hour between talks. The second day of conferences was always the worst. He sighed, wished he’d grabbed a drink, and moved onto the next poster down the aisle, immediately grimaced over the account of a nineteenth-century mastectomy and went onto the next. New developments in pharmacology weren’t all that interesting, and the next one must have had something to do with coffee since someone was giving out free samples, which made it the best-attended poster of the whole floor. He took a cup gratefully from the smiling intern that looked like she was having fun dressing the part of a professional, all the way down to the goggles, handing out cup after cup. He made sure to thank her, and for a moment, her smile looked like she meant it.
The coffee burned his tongue on the first sip, and he stepped a little ways off into a nearby alcove to wait for it to cool.
“It’s a good strategy.” Wilson turned to look at the source of the observation, which was a guy also waiting for his coffee to get a bit cooler out of the floor’s foot traffic – a young guy, about his height, looking almost too young to be here. “They give out free fifty-cent cups of coffee, we buy their fifty-thousand dollar journal accounts because we remember they were nice enough to give us coffee.”
“They’re selling subscriptions? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Or it backfires because all anyone remembers is the coffee, but in case someone bothers to read the poster or take a business card, then they’ll remember what they were trying to sell.”
Wilson looked back at the poster and saw that the guy was right: the company was funding research into all the chemicals found in coffee, some of which might protect from certain cancers in the right amounts. “Bottoms up, then.” The other guy laughed and took a drink, finished his cup as Wilson did. “You want another?”
“We can get seconds?”
Wilson took his cup just in case. “Let me go check.” Sure enough, Erica was perfectly content to provide Wilson the two refills he asked for.
“Thank you,” the guy reached out for his cup even before Wilson stopped walking, took a deep sniff as Wilson leaned back against the wall of the little alcove. “I wasn’t expecting them to have coffee this good. Oh, sorry,” he shifted his cup over to free up a hand to hold out, “Bennet Cooper. Call me Ben.”
“James Wilson.” They smiled and shook, and there was that same thing in the way Ben held himself and looked Wilson right in the eye, the invitation of his own first name, that made him continue, “Call me James.”
“Good to meet you, James.” Ben kept eye contact just a moment too long, and held onto Wilson’s hand just a bit too hard, for it to be casual. “So, are you with…”
“Oh, Columbia. Yourself?”
“Princeton.” He took another sip of his coffee. “Didn’t I see you earlier?”
“You might have if you were at the lecture yesterday afternoon on juvenile bone marrow transplants.”
“Did you write the paper for that?”
“I helped with some of the research.”
“No, don’t be shy, it was really good. Your methodology was superb.”
“Thank you.” He took a drink of his own, made sure to take the time to taste it, and Ben was right about the coffee being pretty good. “And are you presenting anything? Lectures, free gummy bears?”
Ben grinned. “No, just to attend, network a bit I guess. Still a student.” He sounded so close to apologetic, as though he was being accused of something, Wilson knew the wrong questions would lead to more discomfort than he’d already experienced. Wilson had done his share of early-career networking and remembered how steep everything had felt when he’d been a student trying to speak with licensed professionals. He had to smile over the spinning, reversed feelings.
“And your research? What’s your focus?”
“Chem. Organic chemistry.”
“Good. I mean, it’s good that you’re in that field, it’s something we could use more people in.”
“I hope so, once I get onto the job market.”
“Well, with your good looks and charm I don’t think you’ll have any trouble.”
“Oh, so I’m charming too?” He grinned wide, glancing up and down Wilson just right.
Wilson knew he was on dangerous ground: he couldn’t go much farther and still be free to turn back. The guy was still a student, definitely and obviously several years younger, and the world of oncology wasn’t so large he’d never see him again. But it’d been nearly five months since his last good lay, Ben’s smiles and flirting looked and felt real enough, and he knew he could afford this little risk. He could joke about networking opportunities later. “More charming than a kitten. And,” he leaned in a bit closer, almost brushing their shoulders, “I’m staying in the Seaport, in this gorgeous suite with a king-sized bed, it’s overlooking the water and everything.”
Ben’s eyes went wide, either at the invitation or the description or from both. “Did Columbia foot that for you?”
“Oh, most of it.” He took a slow sip, the coffee now just this side of warm, keeping his eyes on Ben’s.
“Will they foot room service too?”
“Along with my other dining expenses.”
“Well then,” Ben grinned. “So much for tonight’s round table.”
It wasn’t late enough in the afternoon for them to head over right then, and Wilson didn’t want to rush and draw any attention. They swapped information and made plans, drifted off into the aisles and found each other again several hours later by the round corners of the South Lobby. They kept a respectful amount of personal space between them as they chatted their way over to the Seaport’s restaurant, where they shared a booth and bad jokes about the afternoon’s programming. Wilson passed his key card over to Ben during dessert, and he slipped upstairs when Wilson paid the check and got the receipt and waited a few more minutes before he followed to the room.
He was a little surprised to find out how good Ben was in bed. There weren’t any tricks or secret techniques, just fine form, everything well-practiced. Ben was young enough that he came well before Wilson did and was hard again by the time Wilson hit orgasm. They played with Ben’s erection for a few minutes, laughing about the situation, before Wilson rolled over and sucked him off. He lent Ben a pair of used underwear to sleep in, and the next morning, stepped aside to let Ben shower first. When he walked back into the bedroom, towel wrapped around his waist and dark blonde hair that hadn’t dried sticking to his forehead, Wilson had ironed his clothes and laid them out on one of the chairs. “Ah, here you are.”
“What – dude, you didn’t need to do this.” He pulled the towel up from his waist and started rubbing his hair, giving Wilson an excuse to watch those hands in action again. “I mean I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong –”
“It’s just being thoughtful.” Wilson smiled at Ben’s slight confusion, laughed and waved it off. “Don’t worry about it, I was going to iron my own clothes anyway.”
“Um. Okay, then, um. Thanks.” He picked up his boxers, pressed as well as Wilson could get them on the hotel’s flimsy board – another reason to be glad he’d insisted on having one – and after inspecting them, like he needed to be sure he recognized the pair, pulled them back on.
“Admit it, that feels better.”
Ben looked like he was trying to glare and then just gave up the struggle. “Fine, you tease, it’s a wonderful joy to have freshly pressed boxers cradling my balls.”
“Fresh out of the dryer, there’s nothing better.” He smiled and went back to his pants, getting the creases fresh, but stopped after half a leg to watch Ben get dressed and his skin disappear. First pants and those long legs, he was even taller than Wilson; then his tank top and shirt and it was a shame to see those soft muscles and that splash of hair go away; knotting his tie like he barely knew how to do it, having to hold himself back from going over there; finally Ben was down to tying his shoes and about all Wilson had left to admire was his face, sharp points of a chin and nose and bright blue eyes set just off from each other, wide forehead for a wide face and a grin that could take up every piece of it, all framed by now-dry hair. He ran a hand down his tie, gave out a little noise that sounded like curious appreciation, and then turned back to Wilson.
He jerked a thumb over to the bathroom. “I should, I should get a shower.”
“Right. Right, you should.” Ben’s hand was still on his tie and didn’t drop down. “Right.”
“Last night was really great.”
“Yeah, thanks.” And there was that grin again, honest and gorgeous, and the only option, really, was to plant a kiss right to the middle of it.
There wasn’t a good way to say good-bye and be honest about their prospects of meeting up again, and Wilson had to rush to think of something, looking away and back up once he’d found it, “Good luck with your degree.”
“Thanks, and, yeah. See you.”
“Seeya.” And that was that. Wilson sighed, then picked up his posture, set his shoulders back, and went on to take his shower and make it to the first talk on time.
House didn’t ask much about the conference, and Wilson was fine letting him think it was one of the boring ones, even with the free coffee.
“It’s the college career fairs that have the best swag.” Over the line, he could hear House pacing around his office and fiddling with pens, probably trying to figure out a patient’s new set of symptoms. “Companies can actually pay for that stuff.”
“Coffee would be cheaper than lots of little toys.”
“Little?” House snorted. “Tape measures, foam rubber fruit, corkscrews, water bottles, chocolate bars – full-size ones, too, not the tiny Halloween variety packs.”
“So when you sneak into these do you go as a non-traditional student or a staff member?”
“Oh, staff, definitely. Just look like you’re supposed to be there and nobody bothers you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
House stopped pacing, his breathing picking up enough for Wilson to hear it jump suddenly. “Just look…” Wilson sighed at his tone– he knew that one perfectly by now. He managed to get in a ‘talk to you later’ before House cut the line, leaving Wilson to stare at the phone in hand and wonder if it’d be better or worse if House did that sort of thing in person.
3.
He got the opportunity almost a year later when he arrived in Princeton early enough to meet House at his office. It turned out to be cholera, of all things, a diagnosis House seemingly puzzled out of thin air right after he mentioned sushi as a dinner possibility. When Wilson pressed over their fourth plate of specialty rolls, House explained it was when Wilson had asked how fresh the fish was at the restaurant, and remembered he hadn’t asked the patient about what he’d eaten on his trip to India.
House dipped a fresh piece of mackerel into the soy sauce and popped it into his mouth so he could talk with his mouth full. “He just had to be the best tourist there was and have dinner with the peasantry instead of the hotel staff.”
“The more you know.” Wilson nibbled on a slice of pickled ginger before going for, and beating House to, the last piece of sashimi. The next plate was salmon roe wrapped in seaweed, followed by a roll that wasn’t on the menu and had to be asked for by name, a bright and spicy concoction that had Wilson chugging his beer and House trying to tough it out to impress the chefs. They ended the meal with green tea ice cream, cooling off their tongues and teeth. Just after Wilson handed his credit card over the bar to ring up the check, House, bent over the last of Wilson’s ice cream and still talking with his mouth full, offered up his couch for the night, if Wilson wanted to stay over and didn’t mind buying a toothbrush at a CVS.
House had never offered before. “I – I’m flattered, but really, maybe next time, you know I’ve got errands I need to run tomorrow.”
“I’m twenty minutes away. Stay for the night and get to bed early.”
Wilson laughed as he signed his name on the paper and pocketed the carbon copy. “If I come over we’ll end up in our socks and underwear doing some drinking game and I’ll be up just as late as if I’d driven back to New York.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.” House scraped the spoon over the bottom of the bowl, picking up the last few ice cream molecules clinging to the side, and from the looks of his cheeks, wrapping his tongue around the spoon and sucking it with vigor to get every last one – quite possibly to distract himself from Wilson turning down the offer.
“Not usually, but when there’s already something I have to do –”
“Unless someone’s dying it can’t be that important.” He tapped his finger against his chin and stared at the ceiling, putting on the face of diagnostic medicine. “Can’t be a dentist, can’t be dry-cleaning, can’t be overdue –” he glanced at Wilson. “Wait, is it overdue library books? Please tell me it’s not overdue library books.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny the terrifying power of university librarians.”
nightdog_barks! I hope it's been a nice one, and here's to having made another year around the sun.I'd like to give you something, so I'm taking a page from your playbook and sharing a story from my hard drive I'm never going to get around to finishing where I still think you'd enjoy what I managed to write. It's the "Wilson gets a boyfriend" AU I talked about it a little bit here, and these are the 3100-some-odd words of it I managed to write.
1.
James Wilson was six years old the first time he fell in love. He barely knew about the words but if he had, would have used them to describe how he felt that day, from one moment to the next. There was a program his school put on, a big-brother-big-sister arrangement with the sixth graders helping the students in first with their reading, come with them to pick out books in the library, that sort of social exercise. His teacher, one of those kindly old ladies with long silver hair and thin-rimmed glasses to match, sat her students down on the big reading mat in the corner while the sixth-graders came into the room one by one, to stand by the window until their assigned student was called up.
He remembered being excited at the idea, and that he’d fidgeted on the mat until the door opened and everyone started coming in. He’d started to wonder if this one would be his, or the next one or this one. He’d wondered until one of the boy walked in, taller than the rest with light hair and freckles over his face and wearing a jacket, and the moment he saw him Wilson started hoping instead, wishing for the teacher to call both their names. ‘Wilson’ was so far down the alphabet he knew he’d be called almost-last, and wished the boy’s wasn’t called either, hoping so hard he shivered.
The boy’s name, Rick, was called first, and then his came, and he almost jumped up off the rug to run over. Rick smiled and took Jimmy by the hand, walked him to a bench under one of the trees near the school library, and showed him the book he’d brought for the day’s program. It was something about pandas. Wilson didn’t remember much more about it than an illustration of a mother panda and her baby by a river, and that he could already read just fine. All he’d wanted was to sit next to Rick, scoot closer to him and sit in his lap, listen to him read the words and pull the story together.
He read with Jimmy twice a week for four months until school ended, and even after four months Jimmy wasn’t tired of seeing him come into the classroom, running over to say hello, and walking over to a bench or table in the library and doing their reading together. He learned new, hard words like ‘confused’ and ‘beautiful’ and Rick taught him what mammals were and he watched Rick’s cheeks with all their freckles when he bobbed his head over one of the chapter books Jimmy swore he knew how to read because he knew Rick would like that. It never occurred to him to wonder if Rick liked him back the way he liked Rick, and it didn’t matter either. Rick let him sit in his lap sometimes when they read, and that was more than enough.
Right before the school year ended, his teacher had them write cards to their big-brother-big-sister partners to thank them. Jimmy signed his card – thanking Rick for coming over and telling him how much he liked him and how he wished he could see him during the summer – with ‘Love, James’ to show he meant it, the way his mother told him to sign thank-you cards for birthdays.
He didn’t see Rick over the summer, and sixth graders went to the middle school across town anyway, and Jimmy felt like crying when he realized he wouldn’t see Rick again. But it didn’t take him long to forget being sad, or to start enjoying the summer vacation and everything that came to young boys on long summer days.
Over time, he forgot almost everything about Rick, about buying him the green toy horse with his allowance and the exact pattern of his freckles. All he ended up remembering were the feelings when Rick came into his classroom, and how much he wanted to sit next to him and on his lap, his six-year-old’s devotion, forgetting more until he learned to stop being what other people expected him to be.
When he met Rick, he didn’t realize what that moment of falling in love meant, and much later, when he remembered that moment, he had to laugh at how appropriate it was – how never knowing what was happening while it happened seemed to be his life.
2.
If he put his mind to it, Wilson knew he could come up with at least three or four worse poster sessions he’d attended. He might have to go as far back as the fourth grade science fair, but he was certain he could do it. It wasn’t so much that the posters were bad, exactly, so much as it was that this was an oncology conference and he was certain nobody here needed to feel like they were reading an extra-juicy cigarette package’s warning complete with Technicolor lungs. Still, to be fair to the session at large, it gave him enough of an excuse to duck out of the main conference for an hour between talks. The second day of conferences was always the worst. He sighed, wished he’d grabbed a drink, and moved onto the next poster down the aisle, immediately grimaced over the account of a nineteenth-century mastectomy and went onto the next. New developments in pharmacology weren’t all that interesting, and the next one must have had something to do with coffee since someone was giving out free samples, which made it the best-attended poster of the whole floor. He took a cup gratefully from the smiling intern that looked like she was having fun dressing the part of a professional, all the way down to the goggles, handing out cup after cup. He made sure to thank her, and for a moment, her smile looked like she meant it.
The coffee burned his tongue on the first sip, and he stepped a little ways off into a nearby alcove to wait for it to cool.
“It’s a good strategy.” Wilson turned to look at the source of the observation, which was a guy also waiting for his coffee to get a bit cooler out of the floor’s foot traffic – a young guy, about his height, looking almost too young to be here. “They give out free fifty-cent cups of coffee, we buy their fifty-thousand dollar journal accounts because we remember they were nice enough to give us coffee.”
“They’re selling subscriptions? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Or it backfires because all anyone remembers is the coffee, but in case someone bothers to read the poster or take a business card, then they’ll remember what they were trying to sell.”
Wilson looked back at the poster and saw that the guy was right: the company was funding research into all the chemicals found in coffee, some of which might protect from certain cancers in the right amounts. “Bottoms up, then.” The other guy laughed and took a drink, finished his cup as Wilson did. “You want another?”
“We can get seconds?”
Wilson took his cup just in case. “Let me go check.” Sure enough, Erica was perfectly content to provide Wilson the two refills he asked for.
“Thank you,” the guy reached out for his cup even before Wilson stopped walking, took a deep sniff as Wilson leaned back against the wall of the little alcove. “I wasn’t expecting them to have coffee this good. Oh, sorry,” he shifted his cup over to free up a hand to hold out, “Bennet Cooper. Call me Ben.”
“James Wilson.” They smiled and shook, and there was that same thing in the way Ben held himself and looked Wilson right in the eye, the invitation of his own first name, that made him continue, “Call me James.”
“Good to meet you, James.” Ben kept eye contact just a moment too long, and held onto Wilson’s hand just a bit too hard, for it to be casual. “So, are you with…”
“Oh, Columbia. Yourself?”
“Princeton.” He took another sip of his coffee. “Didn’t I see you earlier?”
“You might have if you were at the lecture yesterday afternoon on juvenile bone marrow transplants.”
“Did you write the paper for that?”
“I helped with some of the research.”
“No, don’t be shy, it was really good. Your methodology was superb.”
“Thank you.” He took a drink of his own, made sure to take the time to taste it, and Ben was right about the coffee being pretty good. “And are you presenting anything? Lectures, free gummy bears?”
Ben grinned. “No, just to attend, network a bit I guess. Still a student.” He sounded so close to apologetic, as though he was being accused of something, Wilson knew the wrong questions would lead to more discomfort than he’d already experienced. Wilson had done his share of early-career networking and remembered how steep everything had felt when he’d been a student trying to speak with licensed professionals. He had to smile over the spinning, reversed feelings.
“And your research? What’s your focus?”
“Chem. Organic chemistry.”
“Good. I mean, it’s good that you’re in that field, it’s something we could use more people in.”
“I hope so, once I get onto the job market.”
“Well, with your good looks and charm I don’t think you’ll have any trouble.”
“Oh, so I’m charming too?” He grinned wide, glancing up and down Wilson just right.
Wilson knew he was on dangerous ground: he couldn’t go much farther and still be free to turn back. The guy was still a student, definitely and obviously several years younger, and the world of oncology wasn’t so large he’d never see him again. But it’d been nearly five months since his last good lay, Ben’s smiles and flirting looked and felt real enough, and he knew he could afford this little risk. He could joke about networking opportunities later. “More charming than a kitten. And,” he leaned in a bit closer, almost brushing their shoulders, “I’m staying in the Seaport, in this gorgeous suite with a king-sized bed, it’s overlooking the water and everything.”
Ben’s eyes went wide, either at the invitation or the description or from both. “Did Columbia foot that for you?”
“Oh, most of it.” He took a slow sip, the coffee now just this side of warm, keeping his eyes on Ben’s.
“Will they foot room service too?”
“Along with my other dining expenses.”
“Well then,” Ben grinned. “So much for tonight’s round table.”
It wasn’t late enough in the afternoon for them to head over right then, and Wilson didn’t want to rush and draw any attention. They swapped information and made plans, drifted off into the aisles and found each other again several hours later by the round corners of the South Lobby. They kept a respectful amount of personal space between them as they chatted their way over to the Seaport’s restaurant, where they shared a booth and bad jokes about the afternoon’s programming. Wilson passed his key card over to Ben during dessert, and he slipped upstairs when Wilson paid the check and got the receipt and waited a few more minutes before he followed to the room.
He was a little surprised to find out how good Ben was in bed. There weren’t any tricks or secret techniques, just fine form, everything well-practiced. Ben was young enough that he came well before Wilson did and was hard again by the time Wilson hit orgasm. They played with Ben’s erection for a few minutes, laughing about the situation, before Wilson rolled over and sucked him off. He lent Ben a pair of used underwear to sleep in, and the next morning, stepped aside to let Ben shower first. When he walked back into the bedroom, towel wrapped around his waist and dark blonde hair that hadn’t dried sticking to his forehead, Wilson had ironed his clothes and laid them out on one of the chairs. “Ah, here you are.”
“What – dude, you didn’t need to do this.” He pulled the towel up from his waist and started rubbing his hair, giving Wilson an excuse to watch those hands in action again. “I mean I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong –”
“It’s just being thoughtful.” Wilson smiled at Ben’s slight confusion, laughed and waved it off. “Don’t worry about it, I was going to iron my own clothes anyway.”
“Um. Okay, then, um. Thanks.” He picked up his boxers, pressed as well as Wilson could get them on the hotel’s flimsy board – another reason to be glad he’d insisted on having one – and after inspecting them, like he needed to be sure he recognized the pair, pulled them back on.
“Admit it, that feels better.”
Ben looked like he was trying to glare and then just gave up the struggle. “Fine, you tease, it’s a wonderful joy to have freshly pressed boxers cradling my balls.”
“Fresh out of the dryer, there’s nothing better.” He smiled and went back to his pants, getting the creases fresh, but stopped after half a leg to watch Ben get dressed and his skin disappear. First pants and those long legs, he was even taller than Wilson; then his tank top and shirt and it was a shame to see those soft muscles and that splash of hair go away; knotting his tie like he barely knew how to do it, having to hold himself back from going over there; finally Ben was down to tying his shoes and about all Wilson had left to admire was his face, sharp points of a chin and nose and bright blue eyes set just off from each other, wide forehead for a wide face and a grin that could take up every piece of it, all framed by now-dry hair. He ran a hand down his tie, gave out a little noise that sounded like curious appreciation, and then turned back to Wilson.
He jerked a thumb over to the bathroom. “I should, I should get a shower.”
“Right. Right, you should.” Ben’s hand was still on his tie and didn’t drop down. “Right.”
“Last night was really great.”
“Yeah, thanks.” And there was that grin again, honest and gorgeous, and the only option, really, was to plant a kiss right to the middle of it.
There wasn’t a good way to say good-bye and be honest about their prospects of meeting up again, and Wilson had to rush to think of something, looking away and back up once he’d found it, “Good luck with your degree.”
“Thanks, and, yeah. See you.”
“Seeya.” And that was that. Wilson sighed, then picked up his posture, set his shoulders back, and went on to take his shower and make it to the first talk on time.
House didn’t ask much about the conference, and Wilson was fine letting him think it was one of the boring ones, even with the free coffee.
“It’s the college career fairs that have the best swag.” Over the line, he could hear House pacing around his office and fiddling with pens, probably trying to figure out a patient’s new set of symptoms. “Companies can actually pay for that stuff.”
“Coffee would be cheaper than lots of little toys.”
“Little?” House snorted. “Tape measures, foam rubber fruit, corkscrews, water bottles, chocolate bars – full-size ones, too, not the tiny Halloween variety packs.”
“So when you sneak into these do you go as a non-traditional student or a staff member?”
“Oh, staff, definitely. Just look like you’re supposed to be there and nobody bothers you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
House stopped pacing, his breathing picking up enough for Wilson to hear it jump suddenly. “Just look…” Wilson sighed at his tone– he knew that one perfectly by now. He managed to get in a ‘talk to you later’ before House cut the line, leaving Wilson to stare at the phone in hand and wonder if it’d be better or worse if House did that sort of thing in person.
3.
He got the opportunity almost a year later when he arrived in Princeton early enough to meet House at his office. It turned out to be cholera, of all things, a diagnosis House seemingly puzzled out of thin air right after he mentioned sushi as a dinner possibility. When Wilson pressed over their fourth plate of specialty rolls, House explained it was when Wilson had asked how fresh the fish was at the restaurant, and remembered he hadn’t asked the patient about what he’d eaten on his trip to India.
House dipped a fresh piece of mackerel into the soy sauce and popped it into his mouth so he could talk with his mouth full. “He just had to be the best tourist there was and have dinner with the peasantry instead of the hotel staff.”
“The more you know.” Wilson nibbled on a slice of pickled ginger before going for, and beating House to, the last piece of sashimi. The next plate was salmon roe wrapped in seaweed, followed by a roll that wasn’t on the menu and had to be asked for by name, a bright and spicy concoction that had Wilson chugging his beer and House trying to tough it out to impress the chefs. They ended the meal with green tea ice cream, cooling off their tongues and teeth. Just after Wilson handed his credit card over the bar to ring up the check, House, bent over the last of Wilson’s ice cream and still talking with his mouth full, offered up his couch for the night, if Wilson wanted to stay over and didn’t mind buying a toothbrush at a CVS.
House had never offered before. “I – I’m flattered, but really, maybe next time, you know I’ve got errands I need to run tomorrow.”
“I’m twenty minutes away. Stay for the night and get to bed early.”
Wilson laughed as he signed his name on the paper and pocketed the carbon copy. “If I come over we’ll end up in our socks and underwear doing some drinking game and I’ll be up just as late as if I’d driven back to New York.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.” House scraped the spoon over the bottom of the bowl, picking up the last few ice cream molecules clinging to the side, and from the looks of his cheeks, wrapping his tongue around the spoon and sucking it with vigor to get every last one – quite possibly to distract himself from Wilson turning down the offer.
“Not usually, but when there’s already something I have to do –”
“Unless someone’s dying it can’t be that important.” He tapped his finger against his chin and stared at the ceiling, putting on the face of diagnostic medicine. “Can’t be a dentist, can’t be dry-cleaning, can’t be overdue –” he glanced at Wilson. “Wait, is it overdue library books? Please tell me it’s not overdue library books.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny the terrifying power of university librarians.”