Work Text:
the moment you think you think it
“Since when do you know how to cook?” Cameron asks, finding Chase in his kitchen.
“It’s pasta,” Chase says, pouring spaghetti into the boiling water. “I’m not sure that really counts.” But he’s smiling, clearly pleased with himself, and when he turns from the stove there’s a look in his eye, warm and familiar.
“Still, you’ve never cooked before. Just what,” she teases, “are you trying to butter me up for?” Chase has an actual kitchen, not an alcove like in her apartment, but his fridge and cupboards are mostly bare, a drawer filled with takeout menus.
“That’s right. This is all a cunning plot to get you to sleep with me. I’ve been working on it for months.” He gets a pan out, sets it on the stove to warm. “Think I have a shot?”
“Men who can cook are pretty sexy…” And even if it is just pasta, there is something about seeing Chase at work she likes. A lot. The way he gets quiet and focused and utterly calm: they’re sleeping together, she can admit she finds it just a little hot. Privately. In her mind.
He’s not intense now: he’s grinning, proud of himself like a kid, and she grins as she goes to kiss him. Friends with benefits. No strings attached. The first couple of times, he hadn’t seemed to know what to do with his hands: he wasn’t inexperienced, she’s seen him flirt with nurses, but he’d been almost scared of her, wary of doing something wrong. She’d loved it, that power, Chase at her mercy and the mercy of her whims. Now she kisses him and his hand goes to her hips. He is the one to pull her closer, hand at her jaw, her ear, oh —
Chemicals and endorphins. He’s attractive, she’s always known that, biological imperatives and good looks and, fine, an accent that was somewhat cute. Hadn’t acted on it, had never wanted to act on it, because biology was one thing but common sense was another. But oh, she likes doing this: likes his hands on her, his mouth on her, how quiet he gets, how focused. His enormous empty apartment, the habits gleaned from years working together, from weeks of sex. He sleeps on his stomach, he hardly needs to shave, he reads bad thrillers and watches way too much soccer. He knows how to cook pasta.
And she —
A timer goes off, and they stop kissing long enough for Chase to turn off the stove. He’s flushed and disheveled and elbows her playfully when she goes for him again: “Dinner first,” he teases, and drains the pasta.
She watches him crack eggs into the pan. “Spaghetti with fried eggs? Some kind of weird Australian delicacy?”
“Hey,” he says without heat. “Chase family delicacy.” He tosses the noodles into the eggs, breaking them up. “I know how to cook pasta, and I know how to fry eggs, and eventually my sister and I thought to combine them.”
“You have a sister?” She watches him divide the pasta into two cereal bowls. Watches his expression change.
“Younger.” He swallows. Hands her a bowl and a fork with a hesitant smile.
Chase never talks about himself, his past, his childhood. It was two years before she knew he was Catholic, three before she knew his mother was dead. He used to cook for his sister. A lot. Spaghetti and eggs, eggs and spaghetti. He keeps secrets like telling might kill him.
It’s such a normal thing, to have a sister, but she’s sure House and Foreman have no idea. They’ve been sleeping together for weeks and this feels more intimate than all of it.
“What’s her name?” Cameron asks, and thinks about kissing him.
She takes a bite of spaghetti.
the moment you think you know it
For the first month of their relationship, Cameron and Chase are unemployed.
It feels a bit like summer vacation. Like they’re living in a bubble. Sleeping in and going to bed on time, wearing jeans and tee-shirts and reveling in their own laziness. They spend days glued together, fucking and buying groceries and lounging around. They are inseparable and happy.
They go to New York one weekend. Chase had lived in the city a few months when he’d first come to the states; Cameron has never really gone. They play at tourists: climb the Empire State Building. Admire Times Square. She drags him to see the Statue of Liberty — she’d had a great-grandfather who’d made the journey through Ellis Island. Chase indulges her. Pretends to look up ancestors of his own, speaking in his best attempt at an American accent. They dress up, have dinner at a fancy restaurant. He buys her flowers.
Everything is so funny. Everything is so fun. Sweet and silly and temporary. Summer vacation.
They go to the Museum of Natural History. Crowded but oddly hushed in the way museums can be, voices echoing and indistinct. Exhibits of taxidermied animals are kept brightly, carefully lit; the halls dark and strangely narrow. There’s a beauty to the arranged scenes, the careful poses and illusionary backgrounds. At one window Cameron sees a grizzly bear rearing on a rocky slope. The next, a squirrel flicking its tail in a heavy snow.
The Hall of Ocean Life is an atrium several stories high, a life-sized blue whale hanging from the ceiling, posed to dive, a school group sitting and laughing beneath its head, voices echoing, bright and sweet. She and Chase separate gradually, looking at different displays at different speeds: meet up at a black window in a corner. Deep sea. A giant squid, entangled with the scarred jaw of a sperm whale, surrounded by blackness. Someone takes a flash photograph: Cameron takes Chase’s hand.
There is something arresting about the scene, for how stark it is. She squeezes his hand. “Gonna tell me how you swam the open seas with these guys?”
He laughs softly. “The whale looks pleased with himself, doesn’t he?” It’s true, the model almost seems to be smiling, despite the giant squid wrapped around its head and mouth.
“Fresh calamari,” she jokes.
“This is fun,” Chase says abruptly — clears his throat. “I mean, you know.” He’s unexpectedly bashful, and she’d worry it was some cute act if he hadn’t then shrugged. “I suppose I just like getting to spend time with you like this,” he says, and it is a line, but he looks so earnest and her stomach —
Vacations end. They both need to get serious about interviewing, their dwindling bank accounts. Foreman called to let her know he’s heading a department at Mercy now, and the summer is drawing to a close. Cameron thinks about how dark it must be in the depths of the ocean. How cold and silent, full of squids and whales. She leans her head against Chase’s shoulder and laces her arm around his and says nothing: he, at least, is warm.
the moment you know it and can’t yet say it
Cameron knocks on the door of the on-call. Hesitant, then catching herself, and rapping on the wood more firmly. There’s no response, but she pulls open the door anyway. The room is tiny and windowless, the bed exactly the length of the space, freezing cold thanks to a vent. “It’s me,” she says softly.
Chase is lying on the bed, legs drawn up, arm thrown over his face. He doesn’t reply. The lights are out, but she knows he’s awake, and the anger comes back. For a second. Hot and overwhelming. He’s such a coward. Faking sleep like a kid, all to avoid —
“I know you’re awake.” She sits at the foot of the bed, sheet and mattress protector crinkling. “I’m not going anywhere,” she warns. The room is dark, but not black: an alarm clock and emergency light mean her eyes quickly adjust. She’s going to wait him out, she tells herself, but within a few seconds blurts: “Nurse Yang told me you were here.”
Nothing. But Chase’s extreme stillness, the steadiness of his breath, all goes to prove he’s wide awake. Like she doesn’t know how he sleeps by now?
She feels the anger creeping back.
They’d had a fight. He’d started it, bickering with her over dinner for no reason at all, looking for reasons to be mad. That she’d known hadn’t helped; Chase was so damn annoying when he wanted to be, and she’d been drawn in. Somehow it turned from takeout to everything. She’d lost her temper. Told him he was passive-aggressive, that if he had a problem he should say it instead of fighting over takeout menus, but by then it was about everything else instead. Cameron had kicked him out, gone to bed, and spent the past four days waiting for Chase to crawl back and apologize.
“What?” she says, heated, when he still doesn’t reply. “You’re just going to freeze me out?”
This isn’t their first fight.
They’ve been bickering as long as they’ve known one another, but serious arguments are rarer. Three or four since they’ve started dating, both resolved within a day or so. Chase showing up in the ER, all bashful and cute: she knows it’s an act but, okay, it still works. Quick to apologize, often with flowers or her favorite foods. She wouldn’t even say this past argument was their worst, except… It’s been four days.
“Great,” she snaps. “Real mature, Chase.”
He shifts, the movement loud between the starched sheets and plastic on the mattress. “Why are you here?” he complains, dropping his arm from his face. “I’m on call. I’ve been here since six, yesterday —“
“I’m here because my boyfriend’s been avoiding me, and I’m sick of waiting for him to get over it.”
“Oh, is that what I am?” he says softly, his tone poisonous: the room is too dim to make him out clearly, but he’s glaring, she knows.
“Don’t be childish.” She doesn’t enjoy fighting with Chase, obviously, but there’s a sort of strength she draws from his anger, knowing she’s right and he’s wrong and foolish. She could break up with him right now, and he couldn’t stop her. She doesn’t plan to, but they both know it.
“Right, I’ll just get over it.” His legs drop to the side and he shifts ineffectually, another burst of crinkling plastic sounds, trying to turn towards the wall. Avoidance, as always.
“I think you can get over having Chinese for dinner twice in one week, yeah,” Cameron says, rolling her eyes. Maybe this is a waste of time. But it’s been four days; how long is she supposed to wait? He’s never taken more than one or two, never avoided her like this —
He sits up on his elbows. “That’s not what this is about!”
His tone makes her stomach drop, but he doesn’t elaborate, and for a few seconds Cameron founders. “Then what?” she says finally. “If you’re so mad, I have a right to know why.”
If it isn’t some stupid fight, if something’s actually wrong between them, wrong with them, if he’s upset for real and…
But Chase huffs. “Why? I thought I had to just get over it.” The return to passive-aggressiveness is irritating, but more familiar ground. He sits up properly, slowly, and in the dimness she can see his hair falling into his face. Cameron’s fingers itch with an urge to fix it, push it back, even in her anger.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, gentler than before. Her voice sounds strained, it’s a bit forced — but she swallows nervously, and she means it.
Chase looks at her for a moment, then looks off towards the door. “You know what last Friday was?”
“The twenty-eighth?” The joke is feeble, and she has to force a smile to keep from wincing.
“Right.” He’s tired, defeated instead of angry. What was last Friday? It wasn’t a holiday. His birthday is next month, hers in the winter. There’s only one other date — No.
But she does the math, feeling her heart-rate pick up, sweat under her arms: there’s only one other day it could have been.
It wasn’t like Cameron didn’t know it had been a year. Known it was coming up as winter turned to spring and spring began to melt into summer, as Valentine’s Day came and went. Time in the ER bled, her days slipping through long shifts and strange hours. But she could have remembered it was last week. She could have remembered the day.
She hadn’t wanted to.
Their fight had been on Saturday.
“And it’s fine if you didn’t want to do anything for it,” Chase continues angrily. Frustrated. Quiet, looking away even in the dark room, afraid to make eye contact. “I wasn’t exactly sitting around hoping for a soft toy and flowers, I knew you —.”
“You didn’t mention it either,” she interrupts, grasping for anger and superiority.
They’ve been together a year.
How was it possible? How had she let it come to be? And she hates herself the moment she thinks it, hates herself for thinking at all, for just a brief second: this can’t happen. She had been married for six months and seventeen days. She’d known her husband five months and three days before that. How could she let this happen? Let another relationship last longer, to surpass it —
Not that it meant anything. A few extra weeks, it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean she’d replaced her husband, didn’t mean Chase —
“I knew you wouldn’t want it,” he says softly, and it hurts worse, that they both know he's right.
“So you… picked a fight about takeout,” she says weakly. Laughs humorlessly, her head still reeling, counting days and weeks. Brings her husband to mind, and thinks instead — inanely — about rugby, a sport she’d known absolutely nothing about her entire life, before Chase had decided her lack of interest by no means meant she shouldn’t be educated. Her husband liked football. The Bears. Chase pays extra for specialty sports cable.
“We’ve been together a year,” he says flatly. “And I was over, and you said it was your house and so I didn’t get to decide what was for dinner.”
But that’s true, she thinks, and her throat closes up a little. “It was just dinner.”
“Sure,” he says, like he’s not convinced.
Chase can cook pasta and sausages and the basic foods a teenager learns to cook for his sister. He cares far too much about sports like rugby and soccer, and likes to surf with no embarrassment about what a cliche that makes him. He’s a bit self conscious about his accent, but terrible at faking an American one: he likes sweets but drinks black coffee, loves crosswords but hates sudoku, and actually likes green smoothies. He’s passive-aggressive and oblivious and uses the same password for everything; he’s lazy and apathetic, doesn’t do dishes or tidy up, has a terrible sense of humor, and she had never for a second planned on dating him. Planned on this lasting. Planned on…
And it hits her all at once, just like that. Like the worst and stupidest cliche. A year passed without her noticing because…
He’s never said it. Those three words, those huge words. Neither has she, and part of her knows they’re related, knows he won’t and can’t say it and risk being rejected, knows she can’t and won’t say it because to say it is to admit something too huge. And it happened anyway, became important and big and powerful, and she hadn’t even noticed. Doesn’t even know what to say.
“Don’t break up with me,” she whispers, weak, like a little girl. It feels pathetic to say, worse to think, but that’s what’s in front of them, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t he dump her for this, why shouldn’t he? And maybe she should let him, want him to even — preserve her anniversaries —
“I’m sorry about dinner,” Chase says finally.
There’s a pause — both waiting, neither speaking. He lies back down again slowly. Crinkling loudly.
“I —“ she stops herself. Takes a deep breath, inhales until it pinches. Exhales slow. “I’ll let you get some sleep. I’m — I’ll see you later?”
Hesitant. Awkward.
“Yeah,” he says, forgiving her.
the moment you know it and can’t keep it in any longer
Cameron has always liked summer. The heat and humidity and sharpness of the sun, green grass and swimming in the lake and the bursting excitement of thunderstorms. Mid June, they get the first heat wave of the year: Cameron lounges on Chase's bed in shorts and a tank top and watches him wrestle with the window AC.
He’d dug it out of a closet and is trying to get it in the window, balancing the heavy casing as he tries to line it up with the sill. His tee-shirt sticks damply to the back of his neck, his hair is in his face: Cameron should maybe be attracted to the hot man in physical labor thing, but instead she finds his struggle more than a little amusing.
“Thanks for your help,” he says, disgruntled, pulling the window down and screwing the machine in place — but he’s not actually angry, and when he looks scornfully over at her his eyes linger on her bare legs: another thing Cameron likes about the heat is the clothes, shorts and cute dresses and the excuse to wear little to nothing.
“Don’t drop it out the window,” she teases at his look, stretching.
He plugs it in last of all, turning it on with a flourish; the air conditioner hums loudly to life and he pushes his hair out of his face. She feels the first hint of a cooler breeze on her legs, and Chase flops onto the bed at the bottom, nearer to the window unit. “That’s better. This week’s been miserable.”
“Aren’t you from Australia?” she asks, poking him playfully with her foot. “Isn’t it supposed to be pretty warm there? Don't tell me PBS lied.”
“Maybe I’ve been traumatized by years of sun safety lessons,” he retorts, amused. “I like being able to sleep at night without boiling.”
He tugs ineffectually at her leg, not really trying to pull her down the bed towards him; even so Cameron shifts further into the pillows. When she’d first started spending the night at his place, he’d had the sort of basic bedding you bought in a plastic set in a box store; she’d recently convinced him to upgrade, even bought some extra pillows. He’d bought the bed itself when he still had a trust fund, and it’s like lying on a beautiful cloud.
The room is starting to cool. “Come here,” she says, pushing at him with her foot.
“No. I’m in the breeze.” He shoots her a petulant sort of look, points vaguely over his head towards the window.
She laughs and sits up, crawls down the bed to the foot, to join him. Turns herself around so her feet point towards the head of the bed, rests her head against his chest. Part of her thinks of ribs and sternum, lungs and resting heart rates. Clean flesh and spotless organs and no dark pockets of cancerous cells. The way evolution makes her think he smells good, even sweaty and in yesterday’s shirt. His fingers go automatically to her hair, detangling the results of too long in a ponytail.
She tucks her palm between her cheek and his heart. “I love you,” she says.
He breathes in. He doesn’t breathe out. She feels him going stiff, his hand stilling in her hair. She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t planned to, hadn’t even thought — but when Cameron waits for the rush of panic, her usual fear, there’s nothing. She curls her legs. “What do you want for dinner?”
He exhales sharply. Laughs. “Are you —“ Laughs again, almost panicky, and there’s something interesting about hearing it all with her ear to his chest, feeling his heart race, feeling the tension as he swallows.
She takes pity and sits up a little, so they can look at one another. He looks slightly winded, and she’s pleased to see he’s blushing. “Well?” she teases.
“How about Thai?” He has a thunderstruck look to him, his eyes darting about even as he smiles.
“That sounds good,” she agrees. She has to work hard not to smile, leaning into it, enjoying watching him squirm; the way his eyes narrow as he tries to puzzle her out. Playing casual, she pulls away —
— But he grips at her arm, pulls himself up onto his elbow. “Allison.” At her look, he continues. “Are you — you mean it?”
Part of her wants to deny it, to tease him or make a joke of things. But there are times to not be cruel, she knows, and whatever he sees on her face, Chase doesn’t wait for an answer. Sits up more and kisses her, soft and desperate and real. “I love you,” he says when they part, and it doesn’t scare her at all.