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She had solved the problem of Eddie van Blundht for Mulder in the name of professionalism. And she would do it again. She would do it again. She demanded her conscience be clear, even as she tingled like some enchanted fairy every time she remembered how she had solved that problem.
But no, Scully had kissed Mulder in the name of progress. He would have spent every waking moment of the next six months nagging her about the imaginary pissing contest he was having with Eddie van Blundht, concentrating his focus on some macho competition with a criminal, instead of working. She had tried reasoning with him first, but some problems could not be reasoned with. Some problems needed to be made out with at a tacky motel.
The most irritating reminder was the black robe. It sat like a silky pile of guilt next to her sweaters, the “His” stitching rough and turned inside out, fabric soaked in Mulder’s DNA. That’s why she’d taken it – she couldn’t bear the idea of hotel staff having to clean it. Or worse, of not cleaning it. She avoided it like a dead spider, knowing eventually she’d have to bend and pick it up.
And one day she was ready to do that – fold it, hang it, get rid of it, assert her dominance as a sentient being. But as soon as it touched her fingertips, it overpowered her. She pulled memories out of its pockets like tissues – his lips, his body, herself: at the mercy of his touch. She was disoriented. Resisting Mulder was literally one of her job requirements, and she used to be quite good at it.
She wore the robe to bed that night. And the next night. And then again. If it was a guilty pleasure, it was also the last form of sexual contact she ever intended to have with Mulder. Plus, it was lighter weight than her regular robe, and this way she didn’t have to buy a new one. Yes, thriftiness was the point.
She was wearing it in that exact spirit of resourcefulness the night he stopped by and caught her in it. She had opened the door and found him staring, almost dopey with unabashed desire. He was holding roses in his arms… and his arms… She was in his arms before she could say, “Mulder, what are you doing here?” She blamed it on the robe.
But the robe’s powers stopped there. It held no power once it came off her body, apparently. Because that night was not a memory she had to struggle to suppress. That memory did not wash over her like magic. It snuck up on her like the flu, virulent and sweaty.
Mulder was the worst sex she’d ever had.
*
He figured this mood must have started after the Motor Love Lodge. But it didn’t make sense to him. He could still remember the way she woke up against him, her slurry smile, the way she walked naked and unashamed to the shower. By the time she was in the car, she was herself, blazer buttons and all. So she hadn’t whispered sweet nothings at him all day, but she also seemed okay with it.
But one day, he’s not sure which, she began coming into the office with a sigh, sitting in her chair like she was at a funeral. She held her voice steady and cold when he joked with her. She flinched when he innocently put his hand on her shoulder to emphasize a point. She looked away when he made eye contact. It was really kind of annoying. She was really kind of ruining his life.
He decided the guilt of succumbing to her baser desires had gotten to her. And if so, well he had no patience for that Catholic shit. They were friends, adults, and it was just second base –or third base, depending how you counted – even if it was the sexiest base he’d ever personally slid into. The point was, they should be able to get over it.
But he didn’t say that, he didn’t say a thing. In fact, he discussed very little. He kept conversation to office basics, did not touch her, tried not to look at her. Did his part in trying to help her forget it. Even though, as usual, he had the exact opposite feelings about what they should be doing about the situation.
The effort was wearing on him. So he was relieved when he got the phone call that morning. They had hours to go in the car and he would run out of simple conversation soon. There were only so many times you could argue about the radio station. He saved it until they were under the stars, deep into West Virginia, in the middle of nowhere. He thought the darkness would make broaching a touchy subject easier.
“You know, Eddie van Blundht escaped from prison.”
“What?”
“They already caught him and he’s back in. But you should call them back when we get back to the office, they wanted to talk about his medicine. I said all that was your department.”
“It’s not my department, it’s not anybody’s department.”
“You’re the medical doctor,” he quipped. “Just call them back.”
“He started making faces again?”
Mulder nodded. “He was able to disguise himself as a guard and sneak out.”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice.
“Maybe we should go visit him again now that he’s back in,” he said, bravely making an attempt to be cute.
But if Scully was also thinking of their kiss in the parking lot that day, she did not betray it. He shifted in the driver’s seat with the involuntary recollection of her tongue in his ear. And that hadn’t even been the highest point of that day.
“When was this?” she asked.
“They brought him back in yesterday. He’d been out for two months.”
She seemed uncomfortable. Maybe she was thinking about their kiss.
“Was he – ahh – did he --?”
“Yeah, same games. A woman caught his his face changing back while they were taking a shower together. He was rubbing it too hard with the soap. Fuckin’ guy, can you believe it? She broke her leg hopping out of the tub but otherwise she’s okay.”
It was so quiet on Scully’s side of the car he worried she’d passed out. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and thought she looked a little green.
“Are you getting carsick, Scully?”
“Pull over,” she said calmly.
*
She was buying time to gather her thoughts. But it was only a moment before the car was in a field with the ignition off. She let her eyes adjust to the darkness, her forehead dropped tragically into her hand. It slid across her forehead and down the side of her face like a cracked egg. She took a deep breath and aimed its waste out the window.
“What’s the matter?”
“Mulder… do you remember coming to my place about six weeks ago?”
“The time I dropped off your glasses when you left them at work?”
“No, the other time.”
He stared at her obliviously, becoming anxious. He had no idea how anxious he was about to be.
“Mulder.”
“I don’t know, Scully, what am I forgetting?” he said with expiring patience.
She nodded. Task completed. Thoughts collected. “Okay, you know what? Let’s just get back on the road, never mind.” It would be better for her to process this on her own. Give it some thought, journal a bit. Kill Eddie van Blundht. She was not sure it would do Mulder any good to have to share this particularly unpleasant burden.
“No, you can’t do that. You have to tell me now.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mulder.”
“I want to know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Trust me, you don’t,” she said, trying to sound authoritative, flaring her nostrils.
And then his expression changed, body resigning itself to disappointment, lines in his face slid into shock. Too late.
“Scully, no.”
She looked into her lap, could feel the embarrassment dripping down from her eyebrows into her jutted her chin. She braced herself.
“You’re kidding me.”
No, I’m really fucking not, she wanted to yell at him, but managed self-control. If only she had managed some for Eddie van Blundht. She rolled her eyes remembering the way he’d come at her so clumsily.
Mulder was gulping loudly and repeatedly. “How far did you…?” He was unable to finish.
She opened the door. “I’m going to get some air,” she squeaked.
He followed her, slamming the door behind him to punctuate the temper tantrum he was about to throw.
“You slept with him, didn’t you? What the fuck, Scully?”
“The guy was in a maximum security prison, Mulder. How exactly was I supposed to know…?”
“Is that why you’ve been acting so weird lately? Because we had sex?"
She threw her hands up.
“That’s it?” he asked, imitating her. “You’ve been deceived for the second time by a horny moron and that’s it?”
“I just don’t know what else to say about it.” She knew Mulder would have enough to say for the both of them.
“Well,” he said, rolling his sleeves up and putting his hands on his hips like he was getting ready to step into a fist fight with a guy who wasn’t even there. Most of Mulder and Eddie’s vehement race to conquering Scully was apparently conducted while only one of them was there. Sometimes she couldn’t decide which of them was the bigger idiot.
“Let’s have it. How was it?” he asked pointedly.
She held her breath.
*
He thought he could see her biting her lip to keep from smiling, apparently recalling the wonders of what Eddie van Blundht could do to her with Mulder’s dick.
“That good,” he snapped. “This is so unfair.”
“No, Mulder. That bad. Terrible. The worst.” He could swear he saw a fucking grin creeping up the sides of her mouth and if he didn’t have to concentrate hard enough as it was to keep away from her mouth, he would have tried to wipe it off.
“Why am I getting the impression you’re relieved instead of horrified?”
“Of course I’m horrified. But I’m a little relieved, yes.” She tried to phrase this next tricky thing carefully, but it seemed impossible. “Because in some ways it wasn’t as big a mistake as I thought it was. I mean, my having sex with Eddie has no repercussions on my life whatsoever. Except, of course, losing a few hours to screaming at you in a field about it.”
“We have bad sex and I don’t even get to be there to defend myself. That’s fucking great, Scully. Well, you might as well tell me why I was so bad. Am I not physically up to your high standards?”
The grin that had been threatening to break thundered into a guttural laugh.
“Hey, maybe you should try doing it with Eddie in his own body. Maybe he’s more your type.”
“Oh, Mulder, shut the fuck up, will you?”
And he did, but just for a moment. He could hear the desperation in his voice when he spoke up again. “I need to know why it was bad.”
She cleared her throat, rubbing her upper lip to try to bring gravity to the situation. She had to stop to squash a giggle now and then. But she got through it. The way he’d drooled on her face when he kissed her, his resistance to foreplay, the way he’d squeezed her breasts like water balloons, his asking her to call him Popeye. He came first, lost his erection and declined the opportunity to help finish her off. It was a veritable Apocalypse Now of sexual experiences.
“And now it’s all making sense,” she said after the grand finale. She looked as satisfied as she did when they solved a case. Which was nearly never.
“I’m glad one of us is having such a good time.”
“When I brought up the Poconos, he said he hated the Poconos, that it was boring there. I thought it was weird that he didn’t remember, you know.”
“Of course he doesn’t fucking remember it, Scully, he wasn’t there!”
“Well, you weren’t there for the other thing. So now you guys are even,” She gave him that withering glare she saved for instances where she wasn’t even sure what she was talking about. He wanted to either fuck or her strangle her every time she made it.
“It didn’t occur to you that you were being deceived in exactly the same way you were the first time, Scully? You are an agent of the motherfucking FBI.”
She shuffled towards him, her face like a kid pleading to leave the department store. “Mulder.”
He paced in a circle, kicking dirt up with his shoes, shaking his foot out when he stubbed his toe too hard. He was the one who was sick to his stomach now.
“That will forever be your first impression of me in bed.”
“I wasn’t planning on giving you a second impression.”
“Yeah, because he sucked.”
“No, because we’re not supposed to be sleeping together.”
“You’re the one who kissed me. You’re the one who came out of the bathroom looking like lust incarnate in a silk bathrobe and no underwear, Scully.”
“You were having some issues. I was just trying to be helpful,” she said haughtily, straightening up.
She was within arms length, looking at him on an angle. It was the way she used to look at him all the time, but she hadn’t done it in weeks, and now it caught him off-guard. The size and shape of her eyes, the way they improbably commanded his attention from below his shoulders. He felt himself getting sucked into her vortex. Also known as her mouth.
“You’re missing a very salient point, Mulder,” she said in a silky, smug voice.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?” he said, trying to sound sarcastic in spite of the smell of her hair. It reminded him of how he’d woken up to her messy hair under his nose, how romantic her very presence could make something seem, even while stuffed into a novelty lip couch. A warm breeze blew the strands of coppery shadows across her cheek. He could be willing to get bad news more often under such circumstances.
Her fingers climbed up his tie the way they sometimes did when she was fixing him for a meeting. She tugged him along innocently by it as she directed them to get back in the car.
“What salient point?”
“I had sex with him.”
“I think I got that.”
“How many times do I have to unwittingly do things with Eddie van Blundht for you to get the hang of this? Be flattered. Let me be furious. Now, get back in the car, will you?”
He grabbed a fist full of her jacket and pushed her against the car as she had done to him two months ago in the parking lot.
“Ooh,” she said sounding more impressed than surprised.
He felt her pull hit him like a storm current, but he steadied himself, waded in carefully. He placed his lips softly on hers, determined to make the most of his one chance, to undo whatever that idiot Eddie van Blundht had done. Again.
She nipped his lips with hers softly, touched him with the tip of her tongue. His cock rose eagerly to meet the slopes and edges of her thighs and pelvic bones, having remembered them so fondly since the last time they met. Her tongue purred into his mouth when she felt it, an attempt to return the gesture.
“This is more like it,” she said as she paused. She began to arch her back slowly toward him like a cat, and he felt bold.
“Pull up your skirt, Scully.”
“I’m not going to fuck you, Mulder,” she said simply, but she shifted to let him toy with the fabric of her skirt, nudging her forehead against his shoulder and holding his biceps as he wheeled it over her hips.
“No, you’re not,” he said, pressing one hand to the car, letting the other float like a balloon down her body as he dropped to his knees. He squeezed her hips in his hands, bending her to his will. Or rather, trying to give her the foundation to bend to her own. She spread them.
“But it seems unfair for me to be walking around with one extra orgasm, even if I don't remember it.”
He touched her with his tongue first. She drew in a breath of night air, caught it in the back of her throat like a firefly. She braced herself against the car as he measured her with his mouth and turned her inside out. The sound of her voice kinking and coiling in pleasure slid down the chassis like oil.
“Nobody can hear you,” he said, and she believed him. She screamed his name into the dark when she came, intoned a chorus of yeses into his neck when her knees weakened and he caught her. They stayed there seemingly forever, kneeling in the grass, her skirt around her waist, her nose rolling across his cheek and wet mouth. He could see her more clearly in the pitch dark than he had for weeks under fluorescent lights.
“That’s what I would have done if I had been me instead of Eddie being me.”
“I’ll tell him next time I see him,” she said curling the tip of her nose into his cheek as she nibbled his lip. She reached into his pants pocket, nudging his dick through the cotton.
“Keys?” she said.
“Other side,” he said hoarsely.
She picked the keys out of his other pocket and stood up, stepping over her underwear in the weeds.
“I’ll drive,” she said. “You’re going to be uncomfortable.”