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They'd been nursing their beers and watching soaps for a few hours as usual before they’d graduated to tumblers of scotch and the Discovery Channel. They’d been sitting in companionable silence, occasionally hissing in second hand trepidation when a predator snapped at its prey, the liquor loosening their joints and inhibitions so they were half laying on the couch, knuckles, elbows, and knees nearly brushing with every twitch and sip they took. Wilson shifted a little, like he was uncomfortable suddenly and trying to resituate himself into his former warmth.
“I wish you were born a girl.” Wilson slurred quietly.
On the screen, a cheetah was chasing the slowest gazelle, who looked over its shoulder as it jumped a boulder.
The couch under House became a cliff, his stomach swooping, and limbs tingling heavily with the sheer drop that yawned beneath him. He swallowed fitfully, a nervous hysterical laugh bubbling up between his teeth.
“I’m sure Cuddy could lend me a dress if I asked nicely.” House joked in lieu of asking what Wilson meant by all of this.
Wilson breathed a small laugh through his nose and brought the glass back to his lips, as if this confession was as simple as observing the sunset on the Sahara.
“I just never met a girl I like half as much as you.” Wilson tipped his head to look at House. Wilson was flushed from drink, his wide brown eyes glassy and half lidded, eyes at once crinkled with fondness and brows upturned with vulnerability. His lips stayed parted just so as he watched House’s reaction.
House’s chest rose and fell forcefully, though he tried to hide it. “I think that just means you need to get out more, Wilson. Meet more girls.”
Wilson pursed his lips and shook his head. “No, I’ve met lots of girls.”
House swallowed past the lump forming in his throat. “That’s a diplomatic way of putting it, panty peeler .”
Wilson crooked his elbow and used it to hoist himself up to be more level with House, a serious pucker to his brow. House forced himself not to break the eye contact first.
“I think I would’ve been your boyfriend if you were. A girl, I mean.”
The cheetah was closing in on the gazelle who was sprinting, head bowed in determination.
It was a good thing House had so many years of schooling his expression into a neutral mask, though he knew even now Wilson would be able to discern the flickers of emotion that twitched beneath the surface. Because suddenly, House was twenty again, in a car with Crandall who had House & a girlfriend. Crandall, who snuck away from his girlfriend for sloppy head from House then made jokes at his expense if he started to get a little too chummy in public. Crandall, who could maintain his downlow dalliances with House while House was always a little suspect, a little light in his loafers as his father was always eager to remind him. He lacked some kind of covertness that seemed to come naturally to Crandall and, evidently, to Wilson. House remembered wishing he was a girl then, too, so he wouldn’t have to be relegated to the shadows when he lusted after a man. All of this flickered hot and quick, a lick of a flame, in the crucible of House’s chest as Wilson went on.
“I know it’s not possible now, but sometimes, when we’re watching TV together, or you let me make you spaghetti with tomato sauce the way I like it–with a touch of oregano and a parsley stem–I can just picture it.”
House’s lips parted with a click, “Me too.” He whispered.
The cheetah lunged at the gazelle just missing its haunch, making it stumble.
“Do you ever think…could you ever imagine us sh-” Wilson’s eyes flicked away from House’s for a moment and House almost sighed with relief. “Like, sharing a bed? You know, going to work together, and coming home and just doing,” he gestured with the tumbler to the room, a tsunami of scotch breaking over the lip, running down his fingers, “this?” House couldn’t make himself respond, but Wilson went on anyway. “I wouldn’t mind staying home from work when you get sick, even though I know I’d get sick too and have to make soup for the both of us.”
The gazelle was clipped. The cheetah bit again and the front legs of the prey finally folded, pitching both of them forward.
“You sound like a girl.” House deflected as his heart tumbled in time with the desperate prey dancing in the dark before them.
Wilson’s eyes flickered back to his, a sad tilt to them. “You can’t imagine that?” Wilson asked sadly.
House looked away this time, flexing his jaw and sitting up more straight. “Don’t be stupid.” Wilson deflated beside him. “Of course I can, Wilson. I-of course I can.” He gathered his courage, “I can still be those things for you.” He mustered.
The cheetah, pinning the gazelle now to the ground, pressed forward to meet the neck of the gazelle with its maw.
“But it’s just not the same because you’re a man and so am I,” Wilson offered, as if this were new information.
“So?”
Wilson fell deep in thought, considering. The feeling of dangling off the cliff edge didn’t leave House’s body, nor did the hammering of his heart slow.
Blood bloomed, an absolute rose, between the teeth of the cheetah.
“I think…I wonder if it would have changed anything, if we’d met earlier. In college or….” Wilson trailed off, swallowing. House’s fingers were shaking. He sat on them. “If maybe that confusion–well, if it would have been easier then, sharing it with you.”
The rest of the herd kept going, the collective body undulating like a murmuration of starlings. How many of them wished they could fall back and drag the lone gazelle back to safety? Any? Or are they all resigned to knowing some lives couldn’t be saved?
“Why are you saying this?” House begged, trying to inject venom into his voice but just sounding strangled.
“I don’t know.” Wilson admitted to the television.
“Why can’t we-” House cut himself off. “You’re sharing your confusion with me now.” House never felt so off balance, so out of his depth. He liked to keep the upper hand, to have control over the trajectory of a conversation, over his emotions. He hated feeling flayed open, pinned down like a butterfly for Wilson to study here on this couch in this low light, drunk, and wanting, and stupidly wounded by Wilson’s words.
Wilson met House’s eyes once more, softer now against House’s own frenetic gaze. “What if it’s too late?”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
The cheetah was laying now with the limp, hyperventilating gazelle between its paws; a dog working a bone.
Wilson’s eyes roved to House’s lips, and House’s heart leapt.
“If I was a girl, would you have? In New Orleans?” Wilson mused.
”Are you asking if I would fuck you if you were a girl, Wilson?” House asked, bemused.
Wilson’s ears burned red like charcoals. Well when he said it like that…. “Well I-I mean if- when we-”
“Oh unclench,” House rolled his eyes. “Do you remember me trying to fuck you when we met?”
“No, that’s why I’m asking if you would-”
“Because I did.”
Wilson’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline, jaw dropped. “You-?”
“Tried to fuck you when we met, yeah.” House tapped his fingers on the arm of the couch, holding himself back from crossing his arms over his chest to keep some air of nonchalance.
“But I’m…and you’re….”
“Yeah. 'We’re both boys,’ I’m aware.” House tried to mask the depth of feeling that was threatening to surface with a taste of bile. He didn’t imagine quite so much talking when he pictured Wilson realizing his feelings for him, when he imagined showing him it was mutual. “I don’t need you to be a girl, Wilson.”
Wilson looked away, beyond the television with the crimsoned gazelle and the crimsoning cheetah to the bookshelves, swallowing. The admission weighed heavily–an anvil on Wilson’s chest, leaving House’s arms trembling.
House didn’t want to frighten him, or push beyond the boundaries Wilson was ready to cross, but this was something that had been marinating for nearly two decades now in House. This affection had been percolating all the time and now, finally, it was all coming to a boil. He wanted Wilson. He wanted him so badly it made him crazy. He’d spent years pretending it was nothing, pretending he didn’t feel it and that Wilson, in turn, didn’t return the affections. But now, there it was, laid out on the table like a deck of cards, and House didn’t know Wilson’s next move. And he was afraid.
A second and third cheetah burst from behind a dry tree and scattered the throbbing herd of prey, a few trembled and regained their footing.
“I’m not gay.” Wilson finally whispered.
“You don’t need to be.” House countered.
Wilson’s brow furrowed. He was trying to calculate how he and House could be together in a not gay way.
“The world doesn’t deal in binaries, Wilson. I thought you would know that by now. You can just want to be with someone, and not worry about more than that. This isn’t a souffle–this isn’t going to collapse if we don’t follow the recipe.”
“Did you just compare this to baking?”
“I could compare it to sex if you want.”
Wilson’s heart jumped into his throat, his eyes raked up House’s visage once again landing heavily on his lips, which he unhelpfully wetted, seeing Wilson’s attention upon them.
“House I don’t- I don’t know what-”
“If I were a girl, would you kiss me right now?” House asked, voice a dangerously low pitch.
Wilson nodded without hesitation. “Then why not kiss me if I’m not a girl?”
The second cheetah toppled a gazelle running perpendicular to it.
Wilson blanched. Why not kiss him? Except for the fact that he’s, well, a he . House is his best friend. His companion. A man . A man he knows and loves and hates and understands better than anyone else, despite the constant grating, the constant tests of wills, the pissing contests and dick measuring contests and farting contests, all very literally. He can’t risk this friendship, but more importantly, kissing House would permanently rearrange his understanding of himself. If he kisses this man, what does this mean of all the men he neglected to kiss in the past? Of his college roommate who looked at him with the same glint in his eye, who he dreamt about and jerked off thinking of until the summer rolled around and he forced himself to forget again? What of the fellows he studied with in his first years out of med school who invited him over for tipsy nights playing truth or dare that he made excuses to step out of? What of the two decades he spent with House, unkissed and unkissing?
The gazelle, now prostrate neath its predator writhed desperately, pawing riotously at the dirt.
“I don’t know what it would mean.” Wilson admitted fearfully–the heart in his throat flipped as House’s eyes now stopped at Wilson’s lips.
“If I kissed you now, would you be upset?” House asked, more exposed now than he’d let himself be in years, speaking past his veneer of snark and affect.
Wilson shook his head but said nothing, mind still turning over the implications of kissing a man– a man!--this late in his life. The implications of kissing House. He nearly shivered with the idea of it.
The gazelle turned its head toward the cheetah that pawed open its vast chest.
House blinked, thinking for a moment, before bringing a hand to Wilson’s cheek, fingers feeling him swallow heavily as he refused to break eye contact with his longest friend.
House tipped forward slowly, giving Wilson time to come to his senses and laugh this off. When he didn’t, House caught his lips in a kiss. A chaste, tender thing, desperate not to spook Wilson off, desperate to keep this thing, whatever it was, going.
Wilson exhaled as their lips touched, House’s stubble brushing coarsely against his chin, his cheeks. He nearly whined. He realized, as he was kissed, that this was everything he’d been waiting for. Not House, hairless and waif-like, but House, rough and…well manly as he is.The revelation nearly put Wilson flat on his back. He gasped, and House drew back. Wilson, brows nearly vertical with his new revelation, tracked House’s lips as he withdrew. It was dizzying, realizing that he didn’t really need, no, didn’t want House to be a girl. That he wanted this man to kiss him, to love him, to writhe beneath him. Wilson’s throat clicked as he swallowed. House let the gears in his mind turn, confident that the gears would not conclude that he needed to bolt out of the front door.
“I-” Wilson started. But he couldn’t formulate the words he wanted to say. Instead, he pressed forward, bringing a hand to the nape of his best friend’s neck, pulling him in for another kiss, less chaste and more desperate now that he realized it was what he’d been waiting for since he first broke glass with decanter nearly twenty years prior. Wilson whined as he pressed in close to House and House gasped, trying and failing to bite back his own sounds. House pressed Wilson back until his back was flat on the cushions below them.
The cheetah snuffled its muzzle in the warm expanse of the gazelle’s jugular, and it keened and arched beneath its embrace.