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Wilson's hair curls when they're fucking.
It also curls after he runs, or on hot summer days when even the walk from the parking lot to the hospital lobby is enough to get a sweat going, both of which House has already known for years. He watches Wilson pretty damn closely; he knows his walk by sound alone and the shade of his eyes when he's horny and the way his hair curls when it's hot.
These days, though, he mostly associates it with fucking.
They've had sex seven times now. Not that House is counting--except that he is, in the back of his mind. He keeps track of these things in case he needs to blackmail Wilson in the future. It's important for other reasons, too. If he thought there was any chance of him forgetting the respective details of those seven encounters, he might even write them down, because it's only a matter of time. Any of them--number eight or nine or ten--could be the last. He never knows when the next future ex-Mrs. Wilson will blaze onto the scene. He always tries to head them off before they can get too close, like a linebacker charging across an Astroturf field, but at the end of the day he can only run so far and tackle so much. He is, after all, a cripple.
Wilson may have sworn off marriage after the last time, but House isn't stupid. No matter how many drinks he doesn't have, an alcoholic is still an alcoholic. An addict is still an addict.
The first time was right after Wilson moved in with him and right before Wilson moved back out (so fast House could've sworn he'd heard tires squealing as Wilson peeled out the apartment door). They'd come home from some hospital booze-and-schmooze in the early hours of the morning, a little drunk and a lot exhausted, each high off their respective wins (Wilson's poker triumph, House's twelve-year-old case), and someone mis-stepped or someone reached out at the wrong moment and suddenly his hand was tracing the shape of Wilson's erection through his pants and Wilson was groping him, practically panting in his face. They ended up jerking each other off in House's bed, Wilson's kisses scorching his already overheated skin. Wilson groaned wordlessly when he came, spattering House's chest, his fingers tightening on House's arm.
It was over fast, and then it was over fast--Wilson was up and out of there before House could think about whether he even wanted to voice an objection. He passed out instead and slept until late afternoon, and when he finally got up, Wilson had packed his things and was long, long gone.
They never spoke of it.
The second time was actually the first time Wilson came back to House's apartment after the first time, and as if that wasn't confusing enough, what Wilson did when he got inside the apartment sent the whole thing to an entirely new level of perplexity.
He wouldn't sit down, to start with. He sort of paced around the place, straightening piles of magazines and clearing up any trash he could find like a nervous housekeeper. House watched him from the sofa for a while before standing up and moving directly into his path so that when Wilson paced back in his direction, he was forced to stop.
Wilson took a deep, shuddering breath, stared at House's neck, and then put a hand on House's shoulder.
Which was strange. It was somehow even stranger than the hand jobs earlier, because those had a definite purpose--getting off--and Wilson didn't touch House, never touched House, without some kind of purpose. Wilson was very utilitarian in that sense.
And then House realized that the touch of hand to shoulder did have a purpose, namely the same purpose as the hand jobs, and then it clicked.
"What happened?" House asked him. "Run out of patients to sleep with?"
Then Wilson had frowned, misery etched onto his face with the permanence of ancient carvings on rock walls.
James Wilson was no different from any other puzzle House had to solve. He was maybe a bit more attractive, on average, and he definitely gave better head, as House learned a few minutes later, but at the end of the day, there was no difference.
The third time took them straight to the fucking, which made House wonder if Wilson wasn't taking his cues from internet porn. It actually happened the day after the blowjobs, when Wilson woke up and pinned House under him and whispered Let me, let me until House groaned and shifted his legs and Wilson's fingers slid up inside him, right inside, right like that, stroking until he was open and panting and so delirious from the staved-off orgasm that he would have let Wilson drive a truck in there if it just meant he could come already. Which, eventually, Wilson let him do, but only after sliding into him with shallow, persistent thrusts until he was buried deep, fingers flexing on House's forearms, mouth gliding against the back of his neck.
When he finished and withdrew, sated and shaking, House noticed the soft curls framing the sides of his face. His fingers itched to touch. He'd always wanted to pull the girls' pigtails in kindergarten, too; a scientific experiment, although he hadn't had the word for that curiosity at the time. Then as now, he held back, frowning in distaste and turning away.
The fourth time, figuring he was due for some comeuppance, House rolled Wilson onto his back and grabbed the lube first and had two fingers in Wilson's mouth and two fingers in his ass before Wilson could utter a note of protest. Wilson sucked greedily on the fingers in his mouth while House stared and thought, really, Julie was a goddamn fool. Then Wilson arched his back and groaned and his dick brushed against the inside of House's arm and House stopped thinking altogether.
They fucked until Wilson cried out with what House first thought was an orgasm but which turned out to be a leg cramp, and really, they weren't as young as they used to be. So they switched positions and Wilson got up on his hands and knees and let House fuck him from behind, which House did, gladly, until the tight clasp of muscle and the tantalizing curls at the nape of Wilson's neck and the abrupt realization that this was Wilson sent him tumbling over the edge into the oblivion of release.
In the morning, his bed was empty.
That was when he started counting.
Sex isn't Wilson's weakness. Cheating, that's Wilson's weakness, and to cheat, you need someone to cheat on. You need a relationship.
So House and Wilson don't have a relationship.
Oh, they're friends, of course. Best buddies. But they're not together, because if they were together, if they were a couple, then it would only be a matter of time before Wilson felt compelled to fuck someone else, just to ruin things. Almost twenty years has taught House that that's how Wilson rolls, and he'll be damned if he's going to set the guy up to screw around on him.
So they're not together. Not even close.
Numbers five and six happened in the hotel room Wilson moved into after he moved out of House's apartment. They might not have happened at all if House hadn't started inviting himself over, unannounced, usually bearing booze.
He would throw himself onto the room's lone bed, beer in one hand and TV remote in the other. Wilson, flushed and feigning exasperation, would sit in one of the adjacent chairs, as if they didn't both know where he'd end up by the end of the night.
The seventh time happened after House got shot, after the ketamine treatment, after his release from the hospital and the start of his convalescence. Way after. For a guy whose job it was to diagnose and comfort the sick and the dying, Wilson was shit poor at sticking around when the "sick and the dying" were the people in his life who mattered most. Not that House was Wilson's boyfriend. They weren't together. But one would expect Wilson to drop in on his best friend at some point while he was recovering post-surgery in the same damn hospital in which Wilson himself worked.
One would be wrong.
When Wilson finally did show up, at House's apartment--which seemed to be the only place Wilson could even start to make a move, like a sexual Switzerland, neutral territory, free of memories and loyalties to wives or erstwhile heterosexuality--House had gotten used to the isolation and the lack of communication and the familiarity his own right hand, and he nearly shut the door in Wilson's face. Would have, if Wilson hadn't managed to stick his foot through the doorway first. It might have been nice anyway, to see their positions reversed for a while: cripple and not-cripple.
"How is it?" Wilson asked him in the living room. "No relapse?"
"Fit as a fiddle," he answered, his voice flat.
Wilson nodded, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and then launched himself at House, all hands and tongue and teeth, like a clumsy puppy.
House wouldn't let Wilson do him that time. Instead he bent Wilson over the leather sofa and, standing on his own two blissfully functional legs, fucked him until they both collapsed.
There was the thing with the cop.
House doesn't think about it. It's a time in his life that he prefers to forget. Between the pain coming back, the humiliation, the degradation, Wilson selling him out--
They didn't touch for months after that. Wilson stopped showing up on House's front step at night, looking awkward and sheepish, dark eyes asking silently to be allowed inside. That was when House learned that there were more ways than just marriage to make James Wilson leave you.
After a while, it was like those seven times had never happened.
House would have said that that was the beginning of the end, until Amber Volakis walked into their lives; until she was gone again, just as suddenly as she'd arrived.
He hadn't really known what the end meant until then.
He woke up the second time with Cuddy curled in the chair next to his bed, small feet bare, dark hair framing her face. She couldn't have been asleep long.
He felt her presence, warm as it was, as an absence.
In his head, he'd already done the math on the minutes and hours Amber had left to live, and when he woke up the second time, he knew it was already over.
Wilson was standing in the ICU doorway, hair and clothes rumpled, face puffy and red. Whatever his eyes were saying, House couldn't read it.
The muted beeping of the monitors surrounding him was deafening in the silence Wilson left behind.
House closed his eyes and survived, like always.