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They were driving through a gorgeous stretch of Northern California. Sneaky, sensuous roads leading to craggy turns jutting out dangerously like prominent hipbones over the fleshy ocean; huge, showoffy sunsets through canopies of perpetually damp trees that smelled to Scully of youth and sex. There were only two sounds - the scenery sighing at its own beauty, and the car, which was making a really irritating noise.
Mulder pulled over, popped the hood and jiggled a few things, and then got back in. When he turned the key, the funny noise was gone. So were all the other noises, the ones a car is supposed to make. They would have to spend the night here, he said.
“Here? In the car?” She was dying to get out of the suit she’d been in all day. She thought covetously of the silky lavender pajamas folded neatly in her bag.
“No, of course not. We’re right near Big Sur. This place is packed with hotels.”
And it was. Dazzling spas where you could experience Mother Nature without having to cope with it. Shiny-floored, big windowed-places with grand pianos and Egyptian cotton linens, extra-charge private balconies overlooking violet cliffs. Places that could get just about any two people into bed together.
That is not where Mulder and Scully would be staying. They would be staying at a yurt.
“A what?” she asked as they trudged over some crunchy bark by the light of an overly charming lantern the front desk had given them. Mulder seemed unnervingly delighted by the prospect, and that was always enough to put her on guard. Scully took out her flashlight, but Mulder pushed it away with a disappointed cluck of the tongue, as if to tell her what a bad sport she was.
“Yurt. It’s the love child of a hotel room and a tent. And Scully, there are goats somewhere we can go pet tomorrow,” he said. He stopped and beamed at a domelike shelter. “This is it.”
“Looks like ours got more of the tent genes,” she said. But Mulder, giddy as a boy scout, jiggled a key.
“No, no, it even has a door.”
The room had a certain curated loveliness to it, like being a human inside a terrarium. The white “walls” cast a nice glow in the low “efficient” light and it was filled with adorable rustic California things like soy candles and succulents, lush bedding in earth tones. It would have been a really nice inside of somewhere, except it was outside.
Also, there were only two twin beds and no bathroom. “Really Mulder? A shared bathroom?”
“It’s probably more of an outhouse and an outdoor shower.”
She sighed.
“Come on, this is Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ favorite place,” Mulder said. “Well, not Grumpy, he hates it. Don’t be that guy.”
“Can’t we at least afford two almost-tents?” she said. She was anxious for some alone time. The moody drive had set her up for a date night with herself.
“This is the only one they had left. This and the honeymoon suite.”
“Is that indoors?”
“No, it’s basically this with a king-size bed.”
“Fine. Mine’s on the right.”
“Do you like camping, Scully?” he asked with what seemed like forced curiosity.
She looked around for a thermostat. It was freezing.
“Is there heat?” The lavender pajamas would not do here. She was used to staying in shitty motel rooms, but even the worst of them had a vent in them somewhere.
“No, but there are these organic artisan cashmere blankets.”
She sighed heavily to avoid grinning. She was irritated on the inside but his enthusiasm was warming her outsides over, working its way in. Her mouth, her nose, her chest, other things, she thought as he stretched his long body on the tiny bed and let his feet dangle off. The sight of a man’s feet in dress socks always made her want to cuddle.
“Come on, Scully, it’s not like I purposefully killed the car in the middle of hippy dippy glamp-topia. Can we make the best of it?”
“Yes, I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“It’s very romantic here,” he said a bit shyly. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Ever since the few incidents she was trying not to think about, she didn’t like it when he fake-flirted. The lines on his forehead folded into that protective little umbrella he sometimes held over his eyes. “What I meant was, it has its charms.”
“I’ll be nicer when I find some warm, comfy clothes. I’m going to go out to that little boutique they had near the check-in lodge.”
“And what, sleep in there?”
“If they have heat,” she said, opening the paper-thin door. Any crazy person could burst in and kill them. Come to think of it, they could probably just stick a pin in the thing and deflate it. She made a mental note to sleep with her gun. Mulder shouted out after her. She could hear him even with the door shut. Every yurt in town heard him.
“Might want to use the bathroom while you’re out there! It’s way down at the end of the little honeysuckle path.”
She rolled her eyes as she shined her flashlight ahead and wondered if this was the most ridiculous place they’d ever stayed. No, the MOST ridiculous probably went to that love shack in the Poconos, the scene of one of those incidents, where she had exchanged hand jobs with Mulder on a lip-shaped couch. For charitable reasons.
It had been a hypothetical situation, a kind of adult joke, the idea of teaching Mulder how to seduce someone. But hypothetical or not, the memory was doing things to her. She recalled his lips on her neck, his fingers around her nipples, the skin of his dick as smooth and pink as a freshly-healed wound. No, she thought, wiggling her hips a little to prevent her clit from hardening. They were about to have to sleep in the same room. It was a one-time thing.
Well, that and the tryst off the side of the road when he’d made her come in the weeds to prove a point. Some of Mulder’s methods of debate were more fun than others.
But no, there were no other times, no real efforts made. He had never used the romantic instructions she’d given him, at least on her. Never shown up at her door with a bottle of wine, poised to ask questions and slowly talk her out of her clothes. Once, she thought he had, but of course, it was only him on the outside. On the inside, it had been stupid Eddie van fucking Blundht.
*
Mulder couldn’t stop petting the soft sheet with his foot. He was stripped naked under white and camel shaded bedding, ready and waiting. He had done everything she’d asked for. He had found a little Eternity for Men somewhere in his bathroom, probably a gift from his mother. He’d already started asking questions, for example, about camping. And he had the wine – a bottle of organic, locally grown Napa Valley Pinot Noir that came with the yurt.
He poured two glasses, taking a few sips as he placed them on the nightstand, trying to relax as he made sure all of the pine-scented candles were placed out of the way of anything flammable. It was the ultimate romantic tableau, exactly what Scully had told him she wanted in that silly motel, only the classy version. She would be expecting to come back and discuss a case, but there was no case. They weren’t going anywhere. This was the case. This was Mulder, taking her instructions.
He wondered how deeply her annoyance over the shared bathroom would run. He hadn’t counted that variable in. He chewed his lip at the prospect that she would reject him, and how. It was okay if she found it a little funny - it was meant to be a little funny. But what if she deemed it ridiculous? He didn’t think his self-esteem could withstand the blow of one of Scully’s Richter scale eye rolls while naked and half-hard at the mere thought of her.
She opened the door and stepped in with a little shiver, slipping her shoes off and shedding her coat. He was expecting her buttoned pajamas, but instead it was white thermal long johns - the kind his parents used to make him wear when they went skiing. The shirt was tight and a bit see-through, her chilled nipples the only accessory. The back of the pants hugged her bottom tightly, sewn in diagonal lines over the cheeks, a subtle shadow of the crack of her ass where the seam would normally be on a normal pair of pants.
“Why do they have candles in a forest? Isn’t that unsafe?” she asked as she turned toward him and then squinted in the amber light. “And… is there a reason you’re naked in my bed? I said I was taking the one on the right.”
He said nothing, tried to wait for the ambiance do the talking, but it wasn’t sinking in fast enough. He’d been expecting either laughter or swooning, he hadn’t really prepared himself for G-woman investigative hardball. “I opened that bottle of red and…” he said. Suddenly she spun around at him with her elbows locked, gun aimed straight at him.
“I can do white if you want,” he said, stunned and quiet, his hands up. He gulped. “Rose?”
“Where’s Mulder? What did you do with him?” She walked slowly toward him on bouncy knees, hunting him. Her eyes, fixed on his, were a dazzling shade of blue in the dim firelight, like… like… maybe think about her eyes later, when she was not holding a gun in his face.
“Touched as I am by your concern, this is scaring the shit out of me, Scully.”
“Get out of that bed.”
“I’m not getting out of bed naked with you pointing a gun at me. You want this one, fine. Turn around and let me get my pants on and I’ll take the other bed.”
“Mulder would not get undressed and lie-in-wait in my bed like some sort of crappy Danielle Steel novel. That kind of stupidity has van Blundht written all over it. How did you get out this time?”
“I’m not Eddie van fucking Blundht! It’s me, I’m trying to…!” He was holding his hands up against the headboard in the international language of surrender as he tried to talk sense into her. She climbed onto the bed and straddled his chest – and not in the way he’d been hoping she would. She held the cold metal of the gun against his neck.
“You think it’s funny? You think it’s cute what you go around doing? Well guess what, asshole, you are now going to the meanest, highest security prison in this fucking country until you’re so old your dick doesn’t even work. If I don’t fucking kill you before you get there.”
Mulder gently tried to reach toward her arm to encourage her to lower the gun. “It’s. Not. Eddie.”
Her eyes wavered a tiny bit in doubt as he stared at her with all the Mulderness he could manage. She reached toward the nightstand, the bottoms of her breasts slightly brushing his chest, and he thought he might be off the hook, that she was taking a sip of wine. But instead she came back with the cuffs he’d set down when he emptied his pockets. His wrist burned as she slapped the metal around it, binding him to the recycled reclaimed no-kill vegetarian artisan whatever the fuck wood railing of the headboard.
“Ow!” he howled as she clicked the lock. She sat back on his torso and brought the gun down, reaching instinctively toward an imaginary holster.
“I don’t think the waistband of those is gonna hold that,” he said, unable to stifle a grin. She slapped him. Hard. Okay, obviously didn’t believe him yet. He brought his free hand to his cheek and grimaced. She shoved the gun into the soft tender part of his neck and spoke in a low, threatening voice.
“I’m calling the cops, and you’re going to tell me what you did to Mulder. How long have you been him? I’m pretty sure that was him when I left this room… is he out in the woods? If you hurt him - ”
“Scully, listen to me,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “It’s me. When we stayed at the motel, you told me to be more romantic and I was trying to show you… I was…” he laughed now despite himself, suddenly aware of how absurd the idea had been. “The car wasn’t broken. I thought it would be fun to take you here. We could walk back to it right now if you want.”
She hesitated, licking her lip and furrowing her brow. His eyes tried to follow the dark pink tip of her tongue, raw at the end, all the way back into her mouth where he enviously imagined it stroking the roof of her mouth, tickling the back of her teeth. He could feel her center warm and humid against his belly through the thermal material.
“What size are these PJs?” he asked bravely. She studied him as she talked, her voice absent and flat, distracted by her conclusion-making.
“Boys’ XL. They were out of women’s and the men’s were too big.”
They had the classic split crotch with the hole for convenient camping peeing. He wondered if she’d kept her underwear on underneath. He didn’t think he could see any, but it might be a thong. Would Scully wear thongs?
He squeezed the arch of her foot with his free hand.
“Remember, I did this? You liked that. I mean… I could… give you a massage now?” She glared at him and he released her foot.
“No. Okay, um… let’s see… you told me you’d kissed a girl when you were twenty-three. And you changed into something comfortable… and you said come here - and then we kissed on that filthy couch - and you opened that robe - and you were so fucking beautiful in the fake candlelight that I thought I would die - and then you made me come on your hip.”
She sucked her breath in, a sharp clip of pine scented air whisked right out of the room and into her body.
“You told me when you last saw Eddie that he didn’t know anything about the Poconos. How could he have learned any of this since then? ... It’s just me. Being an idiot.” She laid the gun on the nightstand and clicked the safety, but didn’t undo the cuffs.
“You believe me?”
She was still pursing her lips suspiciously, but he could tell by the way her body was softening, her hips sinking slightly into him, that she knew it was him. He had a dedicated and devout erection now, patriotically holding up the sheet behind her back. She put one hand on his face and slowly leaned in. Her cool hand soothed the skin where she had slapped him.
“You do believe me,” he said definitively.
“This is the only way to be sure,” she threatened. “If this is a bad kiss, I swear to God, you are never seeing the light of day again.” Sure, no pressure.
She kissed him softly, holding his chin, paused to look in his eyes. They seared through his brain, split his soul and his libido in two and then fused them back together into one ravenous monster. He kissed her again and pressed her mouth open. His arm rattled against the headboard as he tried to tongue her mouth the way he thought she liked it. They had only kissed twice, so he was going on memory here, but it was a memory he’d gone over many, many times.
He could taste the natural, gritty peppermint toothpaste she must have used in the shared bathroom and smelled the branchy, raw grains of the unwashed organic cotton she was wearing. She sucked his bottom lip a bit, then the top one, and he teased her, biting a bit, licking a bit as she did so. She pulled away. Her cheeks were flushed and she was breathing deeply.
“Mulder,” she said, suddenly relaxed, like they’d run into each other at Starbucks. Now that he was sure she wouldn’t kill him, he took the time to look her up and down. Material stretched taut over her curves, that recession of her waist that was so perfect it reminded him of the kind of water bottle you took mountain biking, shaped for the easy wrap of a hand. Her nipples were tweaked upward like the little nose of the cartoon Bewitched character. He pictured them wiggling to get what they wanted and a little adoring sigh escaped his lips. She flattened her fingers against his chest and smoothed them out over his shoulders.
“Are you wearing cologne?”
He shrugged sheepishly and her face put up a visible fight to avoid smiling.
“Can you unlock me?” he asked. There was a pause as she looked at him, deciding something, remembering something, he wasn’t sure.
“Not until I’m absolutely sure,” she said, but her voice was husky and coy now, turned up a bit at the edges like one of the women he used to get when he called 900 numbers. “How else can you prove it to me?”
Mulder took a deep breath. Here goes. He ran the free hand resting on the bed over her thigh, let it fall down the inside of her leg and turned his palm over, creeping into the slit of the pajama bottoms. He hesitated to make sure this was what she meant. She breathed harder and he took it as a yes. When his fingertips reached her clitoris, she moaned very briefly. He echoed the sentiment as he noted the moisture on his fingers.
“Well… here’s some proof,” he said. “You taught me this move.” He tried to remember the precise way she had touched herself for him that night, not because he still had anything to prove to her, but for the sake of the game, and because he wanted to make her as crazy as possible. His dick took issue with the memory of her masturbating below him. It throbbed so angrily it felt like it would split his skin open. With psychic precision, she leaned back and reached beneath the sheet, this time, thankfully, to holster his cock and not her gun. He jumped a little as she wrapped her trigger fingers around him.
“And what else…?” she asked. With her hips rolled and her ass pressing into his lower abdomen, he could reach deep inside her. He gave her one finger and then another, one at a time, and then both, sliding and pulling alternatively, moaning as she breathed deeper and let her head fall back on her shoulders.
“Shit,” she whispered with the frustration of someone who had just lost a bet.
“Scully, uncuff me, let me do this right.”
“You’re doing fine,” she said, stroking him smoothly behind her, occasionally letting the tip of him touch her back. Annoyed, he took his fingers out of her body.
“What are you doing?” she said panicky. He tugged at the waistband of her pants.
“I could have used my other hand if I had it free,” he said. She smiled and lifted her leg as he stripped the material off, swinging the empty cloth out of the way. She pressed the lengths of both thighs into him. On one side was her silky bare skin, and on the other, the rough unrefined fabric. In the middle… in the middle… Oh Jesus.
She moaned a little but he hadn’t really done anything.
“What?”
“The car… didn’t run when you turned the ignition...” He ran his hands to her waist, wondering if she was getting mad again, now at his deceit.
“Yes…?”
“That means you did something to it under the hood, doesn’t it? To fake it?” His nerves and dick both jostled as she leaned forward against him. But she was leering lustily at him and he laughed.
“That turns you on?”
“I don’t know why,” she said smiling innocently and tossing her hair over one side of her head. She kissed him again, this time moving between his mouth, his ear, his nose, all the body parts his parents had taught him to name first. The pebbled fabric punctuated the firm, pushy poke of her breasts against his skin. She was dripping, making a tiny pool out of his belly button.
He slipped a hand under her shirt and tried to pull it off. But she squirmed down his body, and the fabric teased him with the skin of her stomach. He tugged up at it again and she gently smacked his hand away.
“Too cold.”
He could easily have spent the entire night obsessing about trying to see her naked breasts but she wisely put an end to that when she positioned herself right at the tip of his penis, awkwardly trying to match him up to her entrance.
“Un fucking cuff me, please God, Scully,” he begged, horrified at the idea that she might not succeed without his help. He had his free hand under her shirt, fingers caging her breast. His extremities were drowning in frustration everywhere they turned.
“This is your final lesson, now pay attention.”
Finally, he thought as she pulled her shirt over her head. But then she changed her mind and left it right… there… Jesus… at the… nipples. She folded the material up, exposing the undersides of her breasts, her bare torso striving toward the tip of his dick, now achingly hard, angrily demanding assistance. Faced with the bedroom equivalent of Sophie’s Choice, he took his hand from her breast and used it to guide himself inside her, helping her take him in one smidgen at a time. She fit him like a warm, wet leather glove.
“You do it little by little, like this,” she said. “But it’s not like you’re working it in…”
He thought of the things he would do to a baseball glove when he played, oiling and heating and molding it until it fit you, the way the process was as thrilling and intoxicating as playing the game. But sometimes even after all that work, the glove still wouldn’t be right, and this already was. You’re supposed to think about baseball to STOP being turned on.
“I get it, one of those – journey versus—destination – things,” he stammered. She slid all the way up, so that he felt the cool air on almost the full length of his wet dick. He held his breath.
“Yes. You’re fucking her as you get there, as you open her up.” She slid back down onto him, now bit a little further than before.
“If you had your other hand free, where would it be?” she asked.
“You really have to ask,” he said, mildly annoyed at how worked up he was. This was supposed to be his seduction. She reached her hand up her stomach to her breast and squeezed it under the material.
“Here?”
“Let me see,” he demanded and she did, finally lifting the material up under her armpits.
“Just take it off.”
“I’m too cold.”
He sighed and licked his lips as her hand moved under the fabric, fingering her nipples on his behalf, and he gradually changed his mind that somehow her clothes being half-on was maybe even better than off.
She laid her body against him as he thrust his hips up gently, following the slow, steady rhythm she conducted. She wasn’t long enough to fuck him and kiss him at the same time in this position, so she laid her head on his chest and put her hands on his shoulders.
Enough was enough. He was taking fucking charge of this thing, handcuffs or not. He grabbed her bottom in his one free hand and used his core strength to slouch up against the headboard, scooting her body on top along with him.
She gasped as he held her face in his hand and brought it closer. Her lips were parted and chapped dark pink, looking as sweet and edible as gum drops. His heart swelled.
“I’m only telling you this because it’s a lesson, and I’m showing you what a good student I can be but,” he said. They were kissing in messy, wet bursts as she squirmed against him. “I love you.”
She hissed into his mouth and kissed him back. “That’s good. That’s good, you should say that when you fuck her, whoever she is. Girls like that.”
He knew she was teasing him, but Scully obviously did like it. Because she started to move furiously. As she rose up to the top of his dick, he managed to lick her nipple once or twice. He wrapped his free arm around her waist and slid her body over his dick, all the way to the bottom, watching himself disappear completely inside her. She breathed hard, looking at the ceiling, maybe slightly in pain. But the noises that came from her throat, through closed lips, told him it was the good kind of pain.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he asked. She nodded, still looking up, eyelashes aflutter. He squeezed her hip and dug his fingers into the flesh of her ass as she fucked him, her stomach pressing into him as her back bowed toward him.
Suddenly, there was a blood-curdling screech. He held her as she rose off him onto her knees, startled and looking in the direction of the window with wide eyes.
“What the fuck was that?”
He closed his eyes, wanting to scream himself.
“A coyote, a coyote. They mimic sometimes.”
“Fuck,” she said angrily. “Mimic what?” She suddenly hopped up, nearly tripping as she jumped off the bed.
“Wait, no, we-“ He would fucking strangle that coyote with his bare hands if she had changed her mind.
But then he realized she was fumbling madly around the table for the keys to the cuffs. He kissed every part of her he could reach as she climbed and reached the key toward his wrist.
As soon as he was free, he scooped her against him and threw his legs over the side of the bed, rooting them to the floor. He straightened up, holding her ass in one hand and snaking his other up the back of her neck. As he buried himself inside her, they sealed their bodies together and became one ferocious organism, wild and natural as whatever was running around screaming outside. She started to rock her hips, almost bouncing.
“Go ahead, I’ve got you.” He clenched his jaw and grunted as she saddled up and broke him in. She rode him hard for the best he-didn’t-know-how-many minutes of his life, her clit pressing flat against the shelf of his pelvic muscle.
“Give it to me, Scully.”
She began to moan and he squeezed her bottom, letting one finger drift into the crack of her ass, lingering lightly over the opening there, enough to feel the the damp, sensitive skin twitch. She grabbed his arms, the only part of him she could reach pressed so tightly against him.
“I - don’t – thinkItaughtyou - that…”
“No, but I’m learning to take more initiative.”
She started to come when he said that, perhaps the culmination of her naughty teacher fantasy. He closed his eyes so the sight wouldn’t finish him off too early. So he didn’t get to see it, but he heard and felt it to the core of his being; the memory of her loose voice and her tight body was permanently imprinted on his brain, would come viscerally to him in moments of intimacy and otherwise, wanted or unwanted. It was, so to speak, a lesson he would never forget.
As the peak of her climax, her thighs quivered and dripped with sweat and other, better stuff. Her voice clung to the railings at the side of her throat, skidding down into her chest as she moaned breathily for God and Jesus and Fuck and finally…
“Oh Mulder…” He opened his eyes at the final shudder. She sat pulsing against him and twirled his chest hair, her forehead clammy and the cotton shirt rolled between their chests. He supported her lower back as he flipped her onto it, slipping out of her as he stood on the floor and held her hips up to him.
“Okay?”
“Yesyesyes ,” she said sneakily, getting it in before her body overheard her. He brushed his fingers over her breasts as he pushed back into her, pumping as she held his face, ran her nails through his scalp. It was only moments before he was ready to come. He pressed his body into her as he leaned some of his weight on his elbow above her head. He held his breath and found her ear, gave her his last word--
“Scullyyyy…”
He rolled off her, held her against his side as he caught his breath. The special eco-sanctified super soft sheets clung to every crevice of his body.
“So do I graduate romance school?” he asked. She nodded. “Now I just have to find someone to date.”
She looked up at him with a little twinge of something in her eyes. Jealousy maybe? He wondered hopefully. He smiled and petted her nose. He had already hypothetically told her he loved her, he wasn’t going to make things any worse by promising to be faithful to someone he wasn’t even dating. He tried not to think about the fact that this would be it, there would be no other times. She had taught him everything.
“I’ll go back to my bed now,” he said and she pulled him back by his wrist.
“Don’t you leave me in this freezing yurt bed by myself.” He dressed her and then scooped her up in his arms.
“Come on, Snow White. Sheets are drier over here.” They settled into the clean, new blankets.
“Hey, Scully.”
“Mm?”
“I don’t know if you’re looking for dating advice, but –“
“I’m not - ”
“These are the sexiest pajamas you own.” She laughed throatily.
“You haven’t seen them all.” He chuckled and felt her breathing grow sleepy. But his eyes twitched around the room as his imagination tried to complete her implication.
“Wait, what does that mean? What does that mean, Scully? What else do you wear? This was my final lesson, you have to tell me or I’ll never know.”
“Go to sleep, Mulder. I’m sure someone will show you their sexy pajamas someday…”
She wrapped her long-johnned leg around his and squeezed the smooth, rounded edge of her pelvic bone into him. Her voice was pointed, though a near-whisper.
“…When you take her somewhere better than a yurt.”