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Two weeks. Chase is a big boy; he can handle two weeks.
Honestly, the first few days aren’t half-bad. Chase goes to work, is allowed to sit in on an experimental double forearm transplant that’ll get him a mention in the NEJ of Med, studiously avoids all the signs of House going stir-crazy without Wilson to keep him occupied. Cameron calls him every night to update him on the clusterfuck of family events that has her in Chicago in the first place—her brother’s 40th birthday, her mother’s 60th birthday, and her parents’ wedding anniversary all falling in the same week, the perfect storm to guilt trip her into using up all her accrued PTO for the year—and Chase listens to the melodic waft of her complaints while eating takeout directly from the carton for once and watching the kind of shitty sitcom reruns that Cameron would roll her eyes at, if she were there. He does boring, gross, adult things, like experimenting with new jerk-off techniques and stopping by Cameron’s apartment to water the plants she keeps killing, and it’s fine. Quiet, sure, and possibly lonely, and certainly not the most fun he’s ever had, but Chase is an adult; he doesn’t need to be with his girlfriend 24/7, regardless of what all of Foreman’s snarky comments to the contrary might imply.
And then there’s a day, the fourth of fifteen, where everything goes wrong, all at once. House swaps out his patient’s chemo for saline; there’s some kind of cross-contamination disaster in the cafeteria that means Chase has to grab lunch from the vending machine lest he accidentally poison himself with stray strawberry; Hourani calls in sick with the flu and Chase has to work a 17 hour shift until another surgeon can be bussed over from General to relieve him. On his way out Thirteen trips and stumbles into him, the swish of her dark hair making him think, instinctively, of Cameron four, five years ago—a sense-memory of her brushing too close to his arm as they jostled one another down the hallways to attend to a code—and it’s the knowledge that it isn’t Cameron, that Cameron is almost 800 miles away and will be for the next nine days, that makes him shoot Thirteen a venomous scowl that he is almost immediately ashamed of.
“Watch it,” he snaps.
“Jackass,” Thirteen mutters under her breath when she rights herself, and she isn’t wrong.
His mood worsens when he gets home far too late to catch Cameron for their nightly phone call; worsens still when he plays the message she has left on his voicemail and discovers that she won’t be able to call again for the next two days—she is visiting her great-aunt Elyssa, who is real, albeit no longer in Philadelphia, and the reception is too spotty to make cross-country calls. I love you, sleep well, rings out hollowly in the emptiness of his kitchen as he scrapes peanut butter onto burnt toast, his first and last proper meal of the day. Insult to injury: he needs to go grocery shopping. Chase crawls into bed at 3 o’clock in the morning, after carefully retrieving a pillowcase that was due to be thrown in the laundry, and turns his head to inhale the faint soapy leftover scent of Cameron: her lavender hand cream, her vanilla perfume. He has never really struggled to fall asleep alone before, not even when he and Cameron are fighting. And they aren’t fighting. It is ridiculous. She will be back in little over a week; he could have joined her, for the first few days of the trip, if he’d only bothered to submit a leave request. Chase is, as ever, the architect of his own misery.
“This is stupid,” he slurs into the pillow. Knowing this doesn’t fix anything.
Day five: it is supposed to be Chase’s day off today, but he wakes up after four poor hours of sleep to the phone ringing, and he wonders, blearily, hopefully , if it might be Cameron, calling before she sets off to visit her aunt for two awful, phone-free days. He’s almost fully convinced by the time he actually picks up–is half-smiling, even–and then crashes back down to earth when he hears the voice on the other end of the line: “Dr Chase,” Cuddy greets, sounding sorry but clearly not-sorry enough, “we’ve had to send Deller back to General. Can you come back in?”
If it were House…Chase sees red at the thought. But it isn’t House, and Cuddy is still his boss, and he does still owe her for squeezing him into Surgery in the first place last year; besides which, Cameron has lunch with her semi-regularly now. “Uh,” Chase groans, scrubbing his face tiredly, “just on-call, or…?”
Scarily long pause. “Well,” Cuddy says, clearing her throat, “yes, but we do have several on-schedule already.” Read: no fucking chance you get to nap in the on-call room, buddy. As if reading his hesitance: “But there’s no new patient in Diagnostics, and I’ll make sure you get double-overtime.” Read: at least you won’t have to deal with House.
Chase sighs. Thinks of the fact that Cameron’s birthday is coming up, and that every time he walks past a jewellery store he keeps hesitating in front of the ring displays, thinks of the trip to Sydney he keeps waffling on taking, and the inevitable hit all of this will take on his savings account. Mourns, briefly, for the time he never had to think about money, even if it meant taking his father’s calls once every six months. “I can be there in an hour,” he says.
“Thank you,” Cuddy says. “It’s temporary. I’m calling every licensed surgeon in the state trying to call in favours, I’ll have someone relieve you as soon as I can.”
As soon as she can turns out to be ten hours later, only after Chase loses an otherwise perfectly healthy 64-year-old woman to anesthesia complications during a routine gallbladder removal and has to spend the rest of the shift filling in post-mortem paperwork while awaiting his replacement. Simpson sends him a blistering email about maintaining numbers , as if it’s Chase’s fault his patient arrested right after he made the first incision; to add insult to injury, he’s pretty sure Cameron’s newest houseplant is actively wilting at an even more impressive speed than usual when he stops at her apartment on his way home. There’s a joke in there about killing everything he touches today, but if Chase makes it he might scream. He forgets to go grocery shopping, again.
Day six: “I promise,” Cuddy opens, “I will find a way to make this up to you, but Hourani still has a fever–”
Engagement ring. Wedding fund. Mortgage deposit. “I’m on my way,” Chase says reluctantly. Cameron will call tomorrow. He’ll tell her about this, and she’ll laugh.
On the seventh day of Cameron’s absence—eight days until her return, Chase is not counting—Foreman accosts him. Kidnaps him, really; one moment, Chase is walking, zombie-like, to the doctor’s lounge in search of coffee (because of course Hourani is still out sick, how fucking severe is this bout of flu ), and the next Foreman is clapping him on the shoulder and frogmarching him to a booth in the cafeteria. It occurs to Chase, vaguely, that Foreman has never clapped him on the shoulder in his life, and if he were any less exhausted he’d be squarking in protest, but as it stands he only has the energy to feel mildly perturbed by the whole thing.
“What,” Foreman hisses once he has Chase properly cornered, “is your problem?”
He has his patented seriously-man-what-the-hell look—not that Chase can sincerely imagine Foreman using those words in precisely that order—complete with the raised eyebrow and all. Chase sullenly sips the soda Foreman shoves towards him and says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit,” Foreman fires back. “You’re scaring the kids.”
By kids he must mean the other fellows; Chase does not bother to point out that this yet another adopted House-ism. “No, I’m not,” he says, but thinks guiltily of Thirteen bumping into him as he says it.
“Kutner thinks you’re suicidal,” Foreman deadpans. Chase doesn’t even get to dignify that with a response, because Foreman barrels on with, “of course, Kutner makes up stories about aliens and dragons in his spare time, but you get the point. This can’t just be because of Cameron.”
Chase pokes sulkily at his straw.
“Chase,” Foreman says slowly, with what might be a rising note of hysteria, “this can’t seriously be because of Cameron.”
The thing is, Chase works shifts without Cameron all the time. Is sometimes scheduled that way deliberately; Cuddy has a conniption fit about HR compliance and professional workplace relationships at least twice a month, likely in an attempt to undo some of the overall damage House deals to employer-employee relations every time he opens his mouth, and, because Cameron got very insistent about filing relationship declaration forms as soon as they returned to PPTH, they are often the first casualties. Chase does not want to spend all of his time with Cameron. Never has. Prides himself, even, on being the kind of boyfriend to encourage her to take girls’ trips and take time for herself and not worry about needing to call back right away. Clinginess, the banker he dated six years ago had told him, is not an attractive trait.
Then again, it is possible Chase shouldn’t have been taking relationship advice from a woman who liked having an open flame near her nipples.
“I’m tired,” Chase snaps. “Hourani’s been out so long that I’m thinking of moving into the on-call room permanently. Tell the fellows to get over themselves.”
Four, five years ago, camping out in the on-call room and taking it in turns with Cameron to keep watch over their patient; two, three years ago, splitting his last hundred dollar bill during Tritter so she could buy tampons and he could grab everyone dinner. Watching her from across the office and fantasising, just for a second, that she might look back. Not knowing quite what to do if she did. When she did. Has anything changed, Chase thinks, suddenly depleted. Is she really any closer?
She is, of course. It’s just harder to conceptualise when she isn’t literally within reach.
“Dude,” Foreman says pityingly, “go home. Stick your fingers down your throat and tell Cuddy you have a stomach bug before you wind up killing someone.”
Chase wonders, vaguely, if everyone in this hospital has been replaced with body doubles while he’s been on-call. Resists the urge to add, don’t you mean someone else? “Nah,” he says. It burns his throat on its way out. “I’m good.”
“So I hear Cameron’s away,” Taub says an hour later, in the middle of an emergency appendectomy, fucking finally tagged in from Diagnostics after Cuddy decides the post-case vacation is over and successfully has House abducted for clinic duty.
“Scalpel,” Chase demands. Adds, casually, “Yeah. How’s your wife doing?”
Taub asks one of the nurses to put on a Stone Roses CD. He does not say anything else.
On day eight, seven days left, Cameron calls briefly at 8pm to announce she’s back home with her parents. Her visit to Elyssa lasted three days, not two. “Sorry I’m calling early,” she says, glossing over the extra absence, her voice thin and warped, “we have dinner reservations in an hour and I wanted to catch you before you went to bed. Are you still at work?”
Chase is sitting in his living room, lights off and in a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE sweater he had to liberate from Cameron’s apartment when he stopped by for the plants this morning, telling himself he did not throw it on because it smells like Cameron’s detergent. “Got home half an hour ago,” he says; he imagines she is just a twenty minute drive away, that he could hang up the phone right now and meet her for dinner himself, because it is more bearable than admitting how much he misses her, how utterly intolerable he is being. “Hourani’s finally on the mend, bloody slacker.”
“What happened to him?” Cameron asks, amused, and the illusion of her being within arm’s reach shatters.
“Flu,” Chase says shortly, aware that he’s being an ass, feeling too chafed-raw to pretend to be anything else, “it’s not that interesting. How’s your aunt?”
There’s a long, staticky pause. “Robert,” Cameron says at last, artificially measured, “are you mad at me?”
He wants to say: Fuck, I stole my sweater back from your apartment because I wanted to smell like you. He wants to say: Yes, I’m mad at you, I’m starting to realise that I don’t ever want to lose you and I’m not exactly sure how to feel about that. He wants to say: Dear God, I miss you.
He says, lying, badly, “Of course not.”
“I left you a message,” Cameron protests, her tone getting progressively more snippy, “I told you I wouldn’t be able to call—“
“For God’s sake, Allison, I said I’m not mad,” he snaps, undermining his case entirely; he fumbles for the light switch and closes his eyes against the abrupt brightness, casts an arm around for the dimmer and knocks the framed photo of himself and Cameron at Coney Island askew. “I’m just tired.”
If he has this conversation one more time, he is going to scream. “Right,” Cameron says tightly, clearly unconvinced. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” Chase says. It is his own fault, he reminds himself. She asked him if he wanted to come with her. He was the one who balked. “Don’t turn this into something it’s not.”
“Fine,” Cameron says. “I have to go anyway.” And then doesn’t, the silence ringing out for several long seconds, like she’s waiting for something.
“Allison,” Chase gives in, blinking his eyes open again. Reaching out.
“Please don’t make me argue with you over the phone,” Cameron rushes out, and he realises that the tightness in her voice is her trying not to cry. Pictures her teary-eyed and pouting in her parents’ house in Chicago, the childhood bedroom he has only ever seen blurry, faded pictures of, seven-year-old Cameron with wispy, golden-brown hair sitting cross-legged atop lilac sheets and holding up a toy stethoscope with a toothless grin. Cameron knew what she wanted from an early age, Chase knows. It must be nice, he thinks, to be so certain about anything. “Really, don’t do this to me.”
When, Chase thinks, have I been able to make you do anything?
“I have to go,” Cameron repeats, when he doesn’t reply. “We’ll talk about this later.”
She hangs up so quickly that it takes Chase a minute to realise the silence has taken on a different tone. What is your problem, Foreman had said yesterday, and then told him to stick his fingers down his throat, like it’s as simple as that. Purge and release.
It’s funny. Five years ago, Cameron had just been some girl with a pretty smile, once.
“I need to quit my fucking job,” Chase announces to nobody in particular. Cameron, beaming at him from the knocked-over photograph, catches his eye, and he feels her gaze following him all the way to the refrigerator as he takes out a beer.
Chase goes into work the next morning, Hourani back in but Simpson out, now—same flu, apparently. “You’re up next, buddy,” Hourani says, which is less of a threat than it is a promise. Chase rolls his eyes, shrugs it off. Plays nice. Does not quit his fucking job. Does not hide from Foreman, exactly, but certainly doesn’t seek him out, either.
Cameron calls at 9pm on the dot, as usual. “Can you let Wilson know I’m out of town?” she asks. “I forgot to tell him.” It’s so clearly a pretext to talk, maybe not even about the fight—not a fight, Chase corrects, how can they have had a fight about nothing—because even from Chicago, Cameron could call herself. Email, perhaps. Send Foreman, as a last resort, although Chase supposes that that would in turn make him ask why she hadn’t asked Chase, so maybe not.
“Sure,” Chase says. Means to say, I’m sorry . Says, instead, “Is that the only reason you called?”
He could tell her about his week from hell: dead patient, back-to-back nightmare shifts, Foreman apparently thinking he needs to be committed. Worse, or better: Chase could have come with her. Could have met her parents, her mean older brother, her baby niece. Could have avoided this whole stupid fight. Cameron is a nervous flier; he could have held her hand during takeoff, carried her bags through security. Except—
“You’re impossible,” Cameron says crossly, and hangs up. 9:01pm, the digital clock on Chase’s nightstand reads, the display altered from 24-hour time because Cameron struggles to convert it quickly in the middle of the night. One minute exactly.
He has the day off on Friday, his first since Cameron left—not left, went on vacation, fuck, do the semantics even matter—and for the first time since his first night in America Chase sleeps straight through til noon, wakes blearily to midday sun streaming through the curtains and the faint beep of waiting messages on his voicemail. When he stretches his muscles feel faintly sore, and for a moment he worries that the flu has caught up with him after all—but the pain fades once he gets up, first to piss and then to fix himself a plate full of four slices of toast with peanut butter, because that’s still all he has in to eat; a voice that might be his mother’s whispers something faintly about a good night’s sleep curing all ills. Chase tosses his sleep-mussed hair, irritated. He watches the answering machine blink. He thinks about calling Wilson, calling Cameron, and does only the former. Then he heads to the grocery store and then straight on to the gym before he can do something stupid like agree to whatever additional over-overtime shift is undoubtedly waiting for him on the other end of that phone.
It’s safer to shower after his workout, anyway, where the gym showers don’t have Cameron’s body wash or shampoo tucked away in the corners. It’s safer, when Chase thinks about it, to drive past Cameron’s apartment without stopping; Cameron lives in an exceptionally safe part of town, and most of her neighbours recognise him besides, but it isn’t as if Chase normally goes by so often. It’s better, Chase lies to himself, if he leaves it a day or two, if he shakes up the routine—and then he imagines Cameron coming back from Chicago and finding her apartment broken-into, and turns the car back around just in case.
The thing is. The thing is, Chase thinks, fumbling with Cameron’s spare key as he lets himself in, this is the most time he’s spent in Cameron’s place since they first started dating. The thing is, if she actually wanted him to come to Chicago with her, she wouldn’t have asked him if he wanted to come—she would have been all Cameron about it, all pig-headed and decisive, would have told him he needed the time off months in advance instead of giving him less than six weeks notice. When Cameron wants something—when she wants him—she does it. She shows up to his apartment in the middle of the night. She propositions him in a parking lot. She blackmails her boss into a dinner date.
She did not want Chase to come with her this week. He doesn’t need to be a genius to put that together. She does not even want him at her apartment, half the time; Chase had had to have a new set of keys cut just for her, but he’s pretty sure his copy of Cameron’s is the same one she used to keep under her doormat for emergencies. Cameron does not want to be pushed. He can respect that. But he is tired, he thinks, of pulling.
The great thing, Chase thinks, about covering for Hourani was that he didn’t have to think about any of this. There’s a blueberry yoghurt in Cameron’s fridge that’s about to go off, his favourite kind, and Chase eats it on the sofa while making eye contact with the leather-bound cover of Cameron’s old wedding album, tucked away high on the top ledge of her bookshelf. Licks the back of his spoon, and wonders what, exactly, his problem is.
Predictably, three of the messages on his voicemail are from work. One, hilariously, is from House’s pet PI, who is pretending to be Cuddy’s assistant; Chase deletes that one with an eyeroll and a mental note to delist his number. Two are from an increasingly-desperate Taub, from which Chase gathers must mean House is still caseless and that he is, thus, now the latest hostage of Surgery until Simpson recovers (Hourani, Taub claims, has also had a sudden relapse that lines up nicely with his daughter’s elementary school graduation). The fourth is ostensibly also work-related—Kutner, asking if Chase would mind passing on the details about that hypnotherapy rotation he did, he’s thinking of re-specialising—but Chase remembers Foreman’s claim that Kutner apparently thinks he needs to be put on suicide watch, and cuts off the spiel without listening to the end. The fifth—
The fifth is from Cameron, on her parents’ home phone and not her cell. It’s hard to make out exactly what she’s saying; there’s so much background noise, children shouting and giggling close to the receiver and an unfamiliar male voice hollering from further away. Chase’s fingers hover over the delete button as he plays the message three times over. Once, to listen to Cameron’s family and imagine, enviously, covetously, what that must be like. A house full of strangers; a house full of blood relatives with more than a word to say to one another. A foreign country. Twice, to listen to Cameron’s voice, to pick out the low sound of her sigh and the higher pitch she affects when one of the children grabs her attention, the distant fumbling of the phone to her neck as she answers some inaudible question. Three times, to hear what she is actually saying. To listen to the words, and understand.
“Robert,” she is saying, “I tried to get through to you at Plainsboro—sorry sweetie, Auntie Allison is on the phone—and Foreman told me you’d been on back-to-backs. You’re an idiot, you need to tell me these things. I can’t call you tonight—I know!—but let’s talk tomorrow, okay? I don’t—no, I know, Andy, I heard you the first time—ugh. I miss you. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, I love you, please leave a message on my cell when you get this. Yes, Mom, I’m coming!—“
The thing is: I miss you is not I wish you were here.
“Hey,” Chase tells Cameron’s voicemail, “sorry I missed your message. I love you too. Tell your mum happy birthday from me."
He has work again Saturday morning, but only a half-shift; House has arranged some kind of plea deal for Taub in exchange for Cuddy scrounging up a decent case—which must speak to how much he’s missing Wilson, if he’s willing to stoop as low as asking for work—and no longer bankrupting the billing department with his PI expenses, so Hourani’s being dragged back in come hell or high water. “Relaxing day off?” Taub asks, clearly bitter as he finishes clamping a section of bowel.
“A few millimetres higher, I think,” Chase says, taking over. It’s a textbook resectioning. “Yeah, it was ace.” He means to sound gloating, but it mostly comes out as sarcastic and a little wan besides.
“There’s a new exhibition on campus,” Taub says, hovering by the door on his way to scrub out. “I took Rachel last week. Cameron might like it…when she’s back.” Four days, not that anyone is counting.
Sometimes Chase wishes Taub were worse at his job. Or, at the very least, more stupid. He thinks it might be less annoying, that way. “Thanks,” he says. He turns to one of the nurses. “Can we get some music on, please?”
On most half-shifts, Chase sticks around well after his shift ends. Mostly to annoy Cameron, of course—to hang out in the nurses’ bay and make a big show of yawning and stretching, or scribble little nonsense on post-it notes and stick them to the top of random patient files—but occasionally to grab lunch on-campus, or because there’s a Housian storm brewing and it’s a waste of time and gas to head home only to be called back in an hour later. Today, though, there’s blood in the water—House, new case, same difference—and that’s someone else’s problem. Chase drives to Cameron’s apartment to continue overwatering or underwatering her plants, he’s clearly fucking it up somehow, and in a fit of restless boredom vacuums her whole living room, turns on TV and flicks on a random soccer game as background noise. Understands, abruptly, what phantom limb pain must be like.
Cameron is scared all the time, Chase knows. What she doesn’t know: Chase is scared all the time, too.
He’s fallen asleep on Cameron’s sofa, having sunk too-deep into the plush fabric, and has to really scrabble to dig out his cell phone from between the couch cushions to catch her call in time. Cameron’s apartment looks so different at nighttime. Always has. “Hello?” Chase says groggily. It’s isn’t quite 9, only a quarter to.
“Hi,” Cameron greets. She sounds quiet, but not subdued, which is a start. “Sorry, I know I’m early again. Do you need a minute?”
“No, no, I’m good,” Chase protests, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Just fell asleep.” He hesitates and adds, “I’m at your place, actually.”
“Really?” Cameron says. Her voice is lilting now, teasing; nearly six years ago, a stranger had walked into the conference room for the first time, black-brown hair freshly dyed and pinned into a sleek chignon, and smiled at Chase the way he imagines Cameron smiling now, like there can’t possibly be anything in the world not worth smiling at. “Little late to check on the plants, isn’t it?”
“Babe,” Chase says very seriously, “you know those plants are dead. I think I made them more dead. You absolutely cannot get a cat.”
“Uh-huh,” Cameron hums, in her patented we’ll-see register, which means that Chase will see, although he remains a little lost as to why Cameron is quite so insistent on winning him over on the cat idea specifically when it would be her cat, when they live apart. “Stop avoiding the question.”
Well, hell if Chase even remembers what the question was. “I came by after work,” he says truthfully. “I fell asleep on your couch.” Heartbeat. He adds, “I was a dick. I’m sorry. I lost a patient and I was taking it out on you.” It’s a shitty apology, but there’s a dead 64-year-old woman with his name partially attached and his sleep debt is probably big enough to buy out his entire apartment complex and, God, is there anything else to say. Anything besides I miss you even when you’re in the next room.
Here’s the thing: Cameron always goes big, or she goes home. When she knows what she wants—
“I’m flying home tomorrow,” Cameron says.
“You can’t fly home tomorrow,” Chase says, when the initial Pavlovian thrill of that sentence fades and his ears stop ringing.
“I have a plane ticket and a $400 hole in my bank account that says otherwise.”
“Okay, but you can’t,” Chase insists, trying to be reasonable. He remembers Cameron’s sketched-out itinerary for her trip: first her brother’s birthday, then her mother’s, then the anniversary. Thinks of the suitcase packed full of presents to bribe her nieces with. These are not things that Chase particularly cares about, but Cameron does. “You have the—what is it, the anniversary party—“
Cameron bursts out laughing. It’s such a bizarre reaction that Chase can’t help but join her, although he has the excuse of lack-of-sleep delirium and relief on his side; he’s not sure what Cameron finds so funny. “Yeah,” she says, when she has a hold of herself, “yeah, and, I don’t want to be here. My sister-in-law hates me, my dad thinks I should have been a nurse–who cares, I’ve been trying to catch your eye every time someone drives me crazy all week and every time I realise you’re not there I feel like some fifteen year old pining over their first boyfriend. I don’t want to be here. I want to be with you. Why didn’t you come with me?”
Because you didn’t ask would be childish, and not even particularly true. Because I would do something stupid like ask you to marry me is a little closer to the truth, but equally dangerous. “It’s a good thing I didn’t,” Chase ducks the question. “Whole hospital would have shut down, apparently.”
“Well, you’re coming with me next time,” Cameron decides firmly. Like it’s a given. No room for arguments, like there never is. When Cameron knows what she wants... “My flight gets in at 4pm tomorrow. I can be at yours for 5?”
Chase has the day off tomorrow. “I’ll do you one better,” he says, “I’ll be at the airport for 3:15.”
The great thing about Cameron coming home three days early is that she still has four days left of vacation; Chase, feeling bold, calls in sick a day in advance while he’s idling in the parking lot at Newark and gives strict instructions not to bother him unless it’s the end of the world or House wants a patient prepped for surgery, whichever comes first. When Cameron walks into Arrivals at 4pm exactly, Chase is not thinking of the past at all.
“Oh, good,” Cameron says, briefly inspecting her refrigerator later that night. She has reclaimed his UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE sweater and is wearing nothing else underneath, her thighs luminous from where they peek out underneath the navy-blue fabric; Chase is already brainstorming ways to get her out of it again. “You ate the yoghurt I bought you.”
It takes him a moment to process what she’s saying. Sue him, Chase gets stupid after sex, and he usually doesn’t have to recuperate from Cameron quite literally ripping his clothes off as soon as they step through the front door. “Huh?” he vocalises, dumb.
Cameron glances at him over her shoulder as she closes the fridge door, but not long enough for him to read much into it. “You know, the blueberry yoghurt,” she says. There’s a little red mark on her neck, from where Chase scraped her with his stubble, and he can’t stop staring. “It’s your favourite, right? I was worried you wouldn’t find it before it spoiled. Hey, I can’t find the menus for the good Thai place. Is pizza okay?” She shimmies her way back over to the couch before Chase can reply and straddles him so forcefully that he makes an oof sound, which more or less confirms the theory that he’s been reduced to just making noises now, and grins at him fiendishly.
“If we order now,” she adds, pointedly running her fingers down his chest, “we probably have time for another round before it arrives.”
Miraculously, Chase finds his voice again. “Pizza sounds great,” he says. He sits up and kisses the smile right off her face.