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Scully had just tossed her clothes into a pile of decaying rose petals on a presumably filthy bed when she heard a knock on the door. She sighed in annoyance and froze like a spider, trying to disappear. She had been about to draw a bath, ignoring with her most acute powers of denial the fact that she’d be drawing it in the shape of a heart made of chipped red-painted ceramic.
They were in the Poconos, having tackled double the driving and half the amount of witnesses they had intended. One of them, they believed, was here. Well, just nearby - not exactly here, at the Mount Pocono Motor Love Lodge with her and Mulder. Not everyone could be so lucky.
The day was ending worse than it had begun. And the beginning got a pretty good running start thanks to Mulder’s considerable pouting prowess. Throw in one unnecessary visit to a prison, one mounted defense for almost kissing the most ridiculous person she’d ever apprehended, six hours of driving in a preternaturally awkward car, and two rooms at a sleazy old motel. It seemed like no one had stayed here for twenty years, which was actually great news. They were less likely to catch something.
They also happened to be completely empty-handed so far on this case. Which, she might add, was not even something she currently acknowledged as a case.
Of course, there was also the whole pressing Mulder up against the car and sticking her tongue down his throat thing. But she had done that to prove a point. And she had to admit, it was one of her better wins. She had tried to count the number of times he cleared his throat in the car afterwards and lost track somewhere around twenty two. She would glance out the window, chewing her cheek victoriously every time he did it.
Now, here he was knocking on her door at nearly midnight about this man-eating plant theory. He was so predictable. Not even a near mauling from his partner could shake him from his ways. Granted, she had decidedly not predicted how good a kisser he would be. He banged on the door even louder. “Scul-lyyyy?”
Grunting in annoyance at her nakedness, she reached for the His and Hers black silk bathrobes hung in the bathroom. On second thought, she grabbed her clothes off the bed and hopped back into them.
She swung the door open barefoot. “What do you want Mulder?” she asked wearily, her tempo slowing as she noticed he was holding a bottle of pink champagne with the Mount Pocono Motor Love Lodge’s logo on the label.
“It’s dark in here,” he said and reached proprietarily for the spare lamp. Red light filled the room. She didn’t even blink as he nodded dopily at it.
“I don’t want to talk about the carnivorous plant man.”
“Me neither,” he said, eyes darting around. She recognized it as a tell for his nervousness. Though admittedly, there was a lot to look at in this place. Mirrors on the ceilings. Heart shaped fireplace. She could barely believe she was even here, but there were too many things in her world she had to save up disbelief for.
“I was thinking that you were right.”
“On the neutrality of plant spirits? Great. Should I get dressed? Do you want to drive home? Maybe there’s a late flight.”
“No, not that, Scully. You’re dead wrong on the evil plants. I meant about my attitude earlier. The whole Eddie thing – it was defeatist and self-pitying and pathetic.”
She nodded suspiciously.
“And I want to use the whole thing to motivate myself to become better.”
“Better than Eddie van Blundht?”
“No, I thought we already established I was better than him.” She looked down, hoping the red light in the room would camouflage the color rising up from her collar. Maybe that’s what it was for. You came to a place with red lights to do stuff you could not do with a straight face or a clear conscience.
Mulder tried to move past her as he spoke. “I meant, better than me. Or better than Eddie as me might have been. Had you experienced it.”
She raised and dropped her eyebrows. “That’s good Mulder. Let’s talk more about it tomorrow.” He didn’t seem to hear her.
“And I wonder if you might help me with the thing you suggested.”
She shook her head, mind drifting longingly back to the bathtub or even the rose-petal infested bed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mulder.”
“Being a better date.”
He peered at her with his eyes angled upward toward the center of his brow and she bit her lip to keep from smiling. Mulder’s “I need help” face was one of her favorite things in the world.
“I have wine,” he said, holding up the bottle. “You said wine, right? And um, I don’t have cologne but I used the aftershave they have in the bathroom.”
“Mulder,” she said, allowing him to place a champagne flute in her hand as she screwed up her face. “Are you asking me on a date? Like, right now? Because one, my answer is No, and two, you should give the person a little time to get ready.”
“But see, that’s what I need you for, you’re going to tell me this stuff. You’re going to help me get them to Yes.”
She felt her face dip over into Maybe.
“Look, we’re here. We had a shitty day. Mostly. It could be fun.”
Her memory ripped through the pertinent points of her winning argument earlier today. His soft bottom lip, his burgeoning erection against her, his hand on the small of her back. “Yes, it could,” she said, trying to smooth out the dimples in her voice. She looked up at him.
“We work together, Mulder."
“No. No. I know. I’m saying we pretend. Nothing… ah…. Physical, you know. You’re just going to talk me through it. It’ll be like I’m Eddie, it’ll be hypothetical.”
“Who will I be?”
“Whoever you want,” he said.
Suddenly nothing but this offer – not sleep, not the bath, not going home - sounded good to her. She sipped her preposterous champagne and let him past her.
*
“First, you want to think about ambience,” she coached as she began to walk the perimeter of the room.
“I think they’ve got that covered,” he said. She shook and turned a fake candle upside down, switching it on. He realized the room was filled with them, a veritable graveyard of real candle corpses, and Scully was switching them all on.
“You’re going to want to make sure these actually burn when it’s the real thing,” she said. Mulder could swear he detected a hint of playfulness there. Scully was very game when she wanted to be. He flicked the switch to the gas fireplace and the room warmed immediately. “I was a boy scout, you know,” he deadpanned and she gave him a small smile.
“How’s what I’m wearing?” She took a moment to once-over his t-shirt and jeans. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“It’s uh-good enough.”
“Well, don’t say good enough, you’re supposed to be training me –“
“No, it’s good –“
“Tell me what would be better-“
“Do you have a whole closet worth of stuff here to try out?”
“No, but you might as well tell me.”
She sighed and leaned on the arm of the couch. “Next lesson. Don’t try to make her compliment you.”
“Good, good, okay. Right.”
“So we’ve just come home from dinner, let’s say. I’ve invited you in.”
“More like I invited myself in.”
“Yeah, you’re not going to do that when it’s the real deal.”
Scully sat on the couch, Mulder opposite her. He had truly thought this might be a useful and enlightening conversation to have with her. He had truly wanted to make the most of the jump-start to betterment that her kiss had given him. But now that she was sitting on the couch with him with all the red lights and fake flames on, he knew he’d been lying to himself. What he wanted was another jump.
“So you talk to her. Mostly, you listen.” She was curling her legs up under her. “Ask her something you don’t already know about her.”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
“What did Eddie ask you?”
“About high school.”
“Oh my God, Scully, really? Jesus,” he said, unintentionally rolling his eyes.
She was sipping her wine, shrugging with that expression she’d given him in the prison hallway, the one he read as, “Well, maybe Eddie’s right.”
“Alright, I can do better than that,” he said competitively, rubbing his hands together for effect.
He looked into the fire and tried to think of something he really wanted to know about Scully. Usually he just wanted to know if she thought he was wrong and why. Sometimes he wanted to know what kind of underwear she wore, but he knew not to ask that even hypothetically.
“She’s getting bored and tired, Mulder. First thing that comes to mind.”
“Have you ever kissed a girl?” he blurted, wondering if he would get away with it.
“Yes,” she said coolly.
He stared at her, less because he wanted to than because she had obviously cruelly used her powers to cast him into paralyzation.
“Did you like it?”
“It was nice,” she said nonchalantly. “She was nice.”
“You’re not being fair, Scully, you have to give longer answers than that, don’t you?”
“I’m not Scully, I’m your date.”
“Have you, Scully, ever done it or not?”
“My rules,” she said and he sighed. “Fine, but my date still has to converse with me, she can’t just make me pull all the weight or she’s the bad date.”
“You’re right. I was twenty-three. I met her in a bar. She was tall and had long, straggly blonde hair. It was six weeks and it was fantastic.”
“Why did you stop there?” he said, his eyes glued to her mouth as if to guard whatever words it was about to express.
“That bar closed,” she said, her voice lined thickly with irony. She was unbuttoning her blazer. Only a couple were still hanging on, versus the veritable army that he’d faced this afternoon in the parking lot. “Is it warm in here?” she asked.
As she glanced down at her blazer, her lips parted carelessly. He pictured her walking into that bar. Pictured her hands reaching up into straggly hair. He didn’t even know what she meant by straggly, but he didn’t care. He was enraptured. Scully was really good at this date thing. She fanned herself.
“Wouldn’t my date go slip into something more comfortable? If she were having a nice time?” he asked.
“She might,” she said. Apparently, her student had just come up with something she had not thought of first. “I’ll be right back.”
*
Scully’s pajamas were white linen, untested – like all her pajamas - in red lights. She looked at the Hers and His robes and went with His. At least her legs would be covered. She didn’t want Mulder to think dating would be that easy.
And that was the point, she lectured at herself in the mirror, to help Mulder. She scattered strands of hair around and scruffed it at the top: Hair-mussing for Mulder’s greater good and the greater good of women he might ask out everywhere. She pinched her lips a bit at that final thought.
When she came out of the bathroom, Mulder had his long legs stretched out on the couch, his head hanging off the arm of it. She realized the couch was, like everything else in the room, made for two, but expected neither of them to be so tall. He startled when she came in, unfolding his hands from his chest. Why was he looking at her like that? She checked that her robe was not hanging open. He started to put his feet on the floor.
“It’s okay,” she said and sat on the other end of the couch, squeezing her legs into the space between his and the red velvet back of the sofa, so that all four legs were laid in a row across the width of it.
“This is hard without a TV,” he said.
“You don’t want to watch TV on a date, Mulder.”
He fidgeted and the nattiness of his jeans jagged the smooth material of the robe. She had to keep pulling it back over her leg. His shoulders were broad and the cotton of his shirt draped ever so perfectly down his chest, rippling like icing over his stomach where he was slouched forward against the arm of the furniture. He caught her staring and she didn’t even care. And then…
He took one of her feet from beside him and pulled it over his leg, into his chest, squeezing her arch in one hand.
She felt something in her stomach twist and wring warmth out down the front of her body. “Mulder,” she said, meaning to sound responsible. It hadn’t come out that way.
Her breathing had become thin and shallow. He was looking down at her foot intently as he sheathed it through one palm and then the other. She tried to ignore the feeling between her legs and urgently summoned her faculties from somewhere way up in the back of her head.
“Is that your approach? Rub her feet to get out of conversation?”
He shrugged and pushed his thumb harder into her foot. She gasped sharply, looked at the ceiling. Her knee peeked out from under the black silk as it propped up further, both resisting and calling for him. He ran his hands up her calf.
“Uhmmmm… okay…,” she said.
“It seems like a decent approach,” he said.
As he leaned forward a bit she felt the fly of his jeans against her toes, the familiar nudge from this afternoon. She did not remember the men she had dated getting hard so easily. Maybe it had just been too long for him. Maybe it was the red lights. Maybe it was her.
“At some point,” she said… Actually, it seemed logical when she thought about it. They had already kissed once today. Today would always be the day they kissed for a stupid reason in a stupid place, it might as well be twice. “At some point, you can try to kiss her.”
“At some point,” he repeated obediently after her.
“Yes.”
He ran his hand over the top of her pointed ankle. His fingers were almost the length of her foot. “How will I know if it’s the right point?”
“Because she’ll be looking at you like this.”
And just like that, Scully found herself once again with Mulder leaning over her, one hand on the back of the couch, one arm braced between her legs on the cushion. The only differences were that this time it was a lip-shaped couch, she was not wearing underwear, and of course, it really was Mulder.
*
Well, we’ve already done it once today, might as well be twice, he thought. But this time she was in a black silk robe and there were no guards to arrest them for indecent exposure. He was keeping himself bent at the waist, burying his boner in the crux of his body. There was only so much Scully would do in the name of science, he knew that.
She had picked up where she had left off. Her hands around his neck, her tongue gently exploring his mouth. When she tilted her head to get at him deeper, her eyelashes tickled his cheekbone. The hand on which he’d been leaning his weight was now safely at the base of her neck, thumbing the point of her jaw as it jutted back and forth to meet him. The silk brushed his skin and his jeans tightened further. He tried to concentrate on the strands of her hair around his finger.
She stopped. The lesson is over, he thought, his shoulders sinking.
Then she grasped his shirt with one hand, her lids half shut and she said it. The thing that for a month he’d been agonizingly imagining her saying to stupid Eddie. Who, come to think of it, Mulder was starting to regard as his best friend in the world. “Come here, Mulder.”
He shuffled his knees under him as she leaned all the way back. Finally, he hovered awkwardly over her, one of his legs parting hers, the other protecting her from the inside cusp of the couch. His hips were still politely tucked.
“No. Here,” she said, pulling him, still using his shirt.
Most of Mulder’s doubts and hesitations had been left wherever Scully’s blazer was. The remains of them were burning in the fake fire. He melted into her, slid one arm underneath her, holding on to her waist over the belt of the robe. He kissed her again, letting the weight of his cock sink to her body. She hummed into his mouth, and this time did not smirk as she had in the parking lot. Instead she lifted her hips up elegantly, pressing herself into him and polishing him through silk and denim into a perfect solid.
As her body ebbed into him from below, he lowered his lips to her collarbone. She slid one hand down the back of his shirt. “You’re going to stretch it out, Scully,” he said into her skin.
She tore at it with both hands, breaking the elastic so both her hands fit down the opening comfortably. “Yes, I am,” she said, her hands skiing down the muscles along his spine as far she could reach them. Mulder paused to take her in. The bones of her face, her eyes - purple in the crazy light, her perfectly-shaped mouth beckoning him back. And the smooth V of skin between the shiny edges of the black robe.
And just when he thought it could not be any more difficult not to try to have sex with her, she lowered her hand to the sash around her waist. As she unwound the bow and opened the robe, her knuckles brushed against his dick. He put his hand flat against her bare belly, moved the robe aside as he cupped her breast.
“She’s going to let me do this?” he said, experimenting between skating gently past her nipple, rubbing it, squeezing it, watching as he produced a range of results in her constitution.
“If you’re very lucky,” she said breathily. “Oooh, if she’s very lucky,” she added generously.
He lowered his mouth to her chest and brushed her soft skin along his cheek, his ear, his tongue meddling with the aim of her nipple.
“Mmmm…” she said. “Interestinnnnngg…” The lingering consonants reverberated down his body and he pressed his hips into her.
“Oh-God-that-feels-good,” she said as crisp and clear as a piece of looseleaf paper. At once, as if they had both heard a bell or a siren, they froze in place, panting.
He studied the rise and fall of her breast, desperately curious to see the other one, nearly refusing to believe it could be as perfect. He studied the way she sucked the skin just under her ribs in each time she felt something she liked, the slope into her soft, tiny waist. He thought of the part of her that he couldn’t see, the part that was searing through his pants to his pelvic bone. He knew they could not do it, they both knew.
Scully was making her running through possibilities face. The “What can I tell Mulder that he might actually believe, that I might actually even believe myself?” face.
“Hypothetical,” she said, as if brainstorming. She searched his eyes for an answer. Go ahead and tell me one of your crazy ideas, they begged.
“You could show me,” he said boldly into her eyes. She understood him immediately. Her back arched a bit into him.
“Well. Hypothetically, you would do this.”
He leaned back onto his elbow to give her space and she dropped her hand between her legs, black silk fainting dramatically onto the sofa.
*
She was drawing her middle finger in and out of her body while he watched her, feeling safe and sexy under the blanket of his body.
“Scully,” he whispered and she put her other hand to his mouth to stop whatever else might come out. He sucked her finger, cradling it in the loop of his tongue. She heard the audible sigh escape her lips and fluttered her eyes open.
“I’ve never taught anyone this part before,” she said. “You’re my first student.” She brushed the heel of her hand against her clitoris. “There are a lot of different ways to do it,” she said. “I’m just showing you one of them.”
“I’m paying attention,” he said, his hand now rabidly coursing over her ribs, squeezing her breast, pinching her nipple. She didn’t know if the sounds coming out of her mouth were from him or herself.
“You don’t seem to be paying attention at all,” she drawled.
“I ammmm,” he said, his tongue covering each inch of her tits with the obsession he normally reserved for throwing pencils at the ceiling.
She put on her best teacher voice. “Prove it to me.”
He did not look at her, but she felt his mouth smile spread against her body as he promptly lowered one hand, tangling gracefully for a moment with her own wet fingers.
*
The indigo of her eyes escaping her lashes. Her ivory skin flickering in the orangey light like a moth. The depth and density of her slick inner muscles around his two fingers. The slippery, swollen gathering of raw skin under the palm of his hand that nearly matched the texture of the inside of her cheek. He synthesized it all as best he could, focusing in on the turn and pull of his finger as he worked her over from the inside out.
She was humming like a sparrow into his ear when she seemed to get an idea. He always liked it when Scully had an idea, even one he didn’t agree with.
“We have to make sure you can do it while you’re distracted,” she said.
She slipped her hand into his pants, bringing it back out wrapped around his cock. He dropped his left hip beside her and realized the couch was the perfect size for exactly this much square footage of human skin. And people wondered how these tacky places had stayed around so long.
But soon, she was stroking him in her hand and he forgot the furniture and everything else in the room, including what he was supposed to be doing.
“See, no,” she said. “Open your eyes,” she said. He locked his eyes to hers and they moved in tandem inside and around one another. She found the moisture on the tip of his penis and spread it over him, between her fingers. He searched for and found what he wanted inside her, clasping his palm like a baseball glove, the bone between her clit and her G-spot firmly in his claw. She yelped, surprised, and held onto his arm with her free hand.
“That… that… fuck…” she said.
She breathed deeply as he massaged her between his fingers and then managed, “I didn’t show you that. That’s very advanced.”
“I’m a fast learner."
*
Her mind skipped ahead a few seconds, picturing him coming on her hip, seeing it slide down her skin onto the silk robe. Maybe it was polyester. Someday she meant to be the kind of woman who could tell the difference. Right now she was the kind of woman who was getting fingerfucked into eternity by her platonic work partner as he stared unnervingly at her.
“You’re very beautiful, Scully.”
“I’m not Scully, I’m your hypothetical date.”
“I mean it,” he said and she cursed herself as she felt a choke in her throat at his sincerity. She breathed him in to chase it away. The cheap aftershave on his skin muddled with his sweat, his sex, the two sips of pink champagne on his breath... And as he gave his whole hand to her, she knew, hypothetically, it would finish her.
*
He was lost in the pace of her body, the taste of her mouth, and the tug of her hand. In a moment, her voice bled long, muddled chords into his eardrum, her little body shuddering around his fingers. And as she did so, the only thing he could think was, How could I not have known about this?
*
When they were done, she turned in to face him and his hand rested heavily, exhausted, on her hip. She closed her eyes and tried to memorize the exact weight of it, something to keep in the back of her mind while they interviewed the plant people.
“I think you’re better, Mulder, I think you’re better,” she said. He pulled her into him sleepily and his breathing slowed. She thought of telling him to leave.
But then again, it might as well be that day they had fallen asleep together on a lip-shaped sofa.