We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow
on trees, like in the old days.


House, when he’s seven, accidentally intrudes on a kiss. He has just arrived home and is covered in sweat and mud so he’s sneaking around to avoid his father. He doesn’t hear a sound, thinks they’re not home, and goes to the kitchen to grab a cookie.

So he sees them, his mother and father, their backs to him, peeling potatoes. His father is peeling, his mother is cutting them neatly in small pieces. Then his father absently leans in to brush his lips against her hair. His eyes are closed. She leans against him for a moment, then turns on the stove.

Ick, He frowns and wrinkles his nose.


*


When you're sixteen it's easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card

in a department store of kisses.


Prom Guy takes her out back, away from everyone else at the party. He holds her hand tightly and looks at her seriously, and she sees more clearly that enlarged pimple on his nose and the uneven edges of his hair.

He pulls her closer and she raises herself on the tips of her toes a little. She knows what will happen next, she’s read it in books, Her spine is tingly and her mouth is dry and tastes like soda.

Cuddy is sixteen.


*


and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the
little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth.


What.

His tone is neutral and his eyes are still closed. He knows she’s there, he recognizes the soft padding of footsteps on the carpeted floor. Light and a little hesitant, as if she only barely wants to walk towards him.

Sometimes when she’s determined to reach him, her footsteps are confident, and mostly indistinguishable from Cuddy’s. The only difference is that they’re still light, as if she’s tiptoeing somehow still.

What I did yesterday--

She stops, and he opens his eyes a little. She is frowning and shuffling a bit awkwardly, trying to find the right words. He waits her out, unwilling to help.

You kissed back, She says. Her tone is somewhere between accusatory and surprised.

I do that to all my ho’s.

She looks a little hurt at first, then finally she straightens up and has that determined glint in her eyes.

I’m not sorry, She says.

House nods. She waits for him to say something but he doesn’t, and she turns and goes out the door.

He brings his hand to his mouth again, because for a moment, he’s sure it’s bleeding. He’d like to forget that kiss, but he can’t.


*


then look up the first recorded kiss in an
encyclopedia: beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.


The first person he ever kissed was a boy. He was very young, young enough to be convinced by an Egyptian boy that only grownup men kissed girls and why was he afraid to do it, anyway?

I’m not afraid! He had yelled, and pursed his lips and kissed him right there.

The first girl he ever kissed was much later, when he was twelve. That is the official story he tells anyone who asks.


*


Don't water the kiss with whisky. It'll turn bright pink and
explode into a thousand luscious splinters


He kisses her for the first time after Stacy leaves. (To him, at least, it’s the first time. She has her own version of events, but that was another time, to be told in another story.) He is burning with alcohol and she is there, yelling at him for smuggling in whisky in the middle of his rehab. The nurses have all gone, scattering away the minute she had barged in the room. The nurses, Stacy.

She remains though, but he still hasn’t forgiven her yet, or given her a proper punishment. So when she closes in on the space between them, he pulls her down because he is still unable to stand up, and muffles her surprised cry with his mouth and holds down her wrists. He pillages her mouth for all he’s worth and for what he would have liked to do to her if he could use his goddamn leg.

You took everything, he tries to convey, nipping at her lips, roughly sliding his tongue over hers, and he is never sure if she responds, he doesn’t really care, but now that he thinks about it, it’s only after a while that she tears herself away from his grasp, gasping for air.

She looks at him and knows he has won, he recognizes that pure, unadultered guilt, but then she stalks out of the room and yells at the nurse to confiscate every bottle in his alcohol stash.


*


You must

nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights.
Notice how it illuminates the room


Cuddy's version of events goes like this :

They are younger. His leg is perfectly fine--in fact, he's using it to jump on the bar right now to satisfy the audience egging him on to give another go at the beer keg.

He's leaving tomorrow, and she both pities and envies the first hospital he's about to turn upside down and most probably get fired from.

She hasn't had a chance to speak to him yet, and the only time she's sure he's seen her was at the start of the party, when he waggled his eyebrows at her, her breasts and her legs, all separate entities in their own right.

It doesn't look like he'll let up soon, so she gives up telling him goodbye, and has one too many drinks of her own.

The next time she sees him is in the morning. She's still sprawled on the couch she was on last night, her back is cramping, her throat is hoarse and she's seeing double. For a moment there are two Houses splayed on the bar counter, mouths wide open and snoring like no tomorrow.

She unsteadily walks to him, over the bodies passed out on the floor, broken bottles of tequila. Then she leans towards him, has to blink once or twice to make sure who the real House is, and drops a kiss on his nose, because, for the love of god, no way is she touching his mouth.

Goodbye, you moron, She says.


*


The intersection
of function and desire.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss.


It's not important when their second first kiss is. Besides, they both don't think that it counts. First kiss, second fuck, third time House eats pancakes at Cuddy's kitchen--they can never tell which one bleeds to the other and do people like them actually keep track of those things?

(But for the record. She was wearing black, too beautiful, and was saying, Why the hell did you have to fire-- and he had her pressed against her door, cheesy like romance novels, and his hands were tangled in her hair.)


*


She is never sure about her relationship with House, and of course she has doubts about whether this will work. She is a sane being after all, and House is.. not. They haven’t talked about it, I’m not taking you to the prom or anything, House said when she tried.

Nothing has changed, in fact it is so much the same that she is surprised every time she opens her eyes in the morning and he’s there beside her, snoring into her pillow.

Friends with benefits, maybe, or something undefinable (Don’t say fuck buddies, She warns Wilson when he is about to open his mouth. He shuts it quickly.)

She will believe that, she will, it’s just that he’s taken up this habit of poking his head in her office every time she’s working late and saying, If you carry on with this whole working thing, not even quadruple doses of Botox will save your wrinkly forehead, while scrunching up his face.

She sighs, and says, I need to finish this or Then go home yourself.

Sometimes he goes home (to her apartment, of course, where the sheets are way cleaner) or sometimes he stays and wreaks havoc with the night shift nurses.

But more often she finds herself wishing he would go home, because this is the way he says goodbye:

Lumbering towards her, beside her chair, hand on the arm rest, and leaning forward to press his lips to her hair, so light that sometimes she feels it’s never there, but true enough that even when he’s long gone she can still feel an archipelago of kisses scattered on her face.


Even when
I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,

like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your
bones.