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It takes him almost an hour to stop staring at the bedroom door. The green glow of the alarm clock blinks haughtily and changes numbers just before he closes his eyes. It is only one digit different when the door creaks and he sees her feet in his doorway. Trying to steady the thrilled patter in his chest, he stares down at them, watching them pad in quietly, toes lifting and folding down as one, sewn together in the neat beige smile of nylon.
“Are you awake?” she asks. He tries to mimic the cool calm in her voice as he tells her he is. She approaches the bed and places her fingertips on the nightstand, as if for balance. Perhaps this is why people have nightstands.
“I heard what you said.”
“What? When?”
“When you thought I’d fallen asleep.”
“You were pretending?”
“If I fell asleep within twenty seconds of you rambling it would be an occupational hazard.”
He smiles, but when he follows the streetlight off the floor and into her eyes, he finds more purpose than humor. There is no deflection, no escape.
“You said it was a lot, you said it was too late to talk about it.” He scoots back in case she wants to sit on the edge of the bed, but she doesn’t move. They have kissed a few times now, even a bit more than kissing. But each time there is a feeling of coincidence, of inconsequence. A cuddle is an act of intent. “Let’s talk about it.”
A conversation is also an act of intent, whereas rambling is not.
“Why is it ‘a lot’?” she urges. He opens his mouth and then closes it. He can feel his hands clammily clasp the pillow under his face like a life raft.
“It’s just… you know what I meant. The implications. Of, you know, whatever this is.”
“Say it.” She is breathing deeply now, an exercise in control, a meditation. Her voice is husky but laced with adrenaline. “I want to hear it first.”
“You faked being asleep an hour ago so you wouldn’t hear it.”
“I wasn’t ready. I’m ready. Tell me what it means.” It is only then that his brain backtracks and catches the word “first.” It is only then he thinks what might be coming second and feels his stomach jump, his balls stir. He glances nervously past the alarm clock, and that smug green light drips with envy now.
She crosses her arms over her sweater and pulls it over her head, hair parting unevenly over her face, black bra skimming the elegant lines of her body. Without her sweater, the night light casts her in the black and white scale of an old photograph. There are only two colors. There is only one choice.
“It means we’re not just fooling around…” He chases his rapidly escaping vocabulary for the right words as she unzips her skirt. The cadence of his voice quickens to keep step with her, to get ahead of the surging erection stretching itself against the mattress. “It means we’re not just lonely. It means it’s not just that we haven’t had sex in too long. It means we’ve been idiots for years, taking things too slowly, oblivious.”
She kicks aside the wool-blend at her feet and moves a few inches closer to the bed, her fingers floating from the furniture to the bed. He’s grateful she hasn’t touched him yet – the moment she does, his clarity will abandon him. And it is obvious she wants clarity. That is the “first.” He wonders if she’d have the strength to turn around and walk out half naked if she didn’t hear what she wanted to hear.
But she’s going to hear it.
“It means I’m in love with you.”
She nods as if she’s teaching him a language he doesn’t speak fluently, and in a way, she is.
In a moment, they are kissing and this time it is not whimsical, it leaves no room for interpretation. As if to prove his commitment, he swings his legs over the side of the bed, wrapping them around her knees and pulling her toward him. He reaches around for the clasp of her bra, lets it wither between their bodies and find its own way to the floor as he tightens the grip of his hand around her scapula and his lips around her nipple.
She sighs and drops her face into his hair, her forehead heavy against his skull as she slips her hands under the tight tops of her pantyhose and rolls them off. There is the scratch of the material tearing as her feet come sloppily up one by one to step out of them. He licks her collarbone, her neck as she bends sideways, lays his fingers over the squiggly indentations left on her waist by the material and then spins her, tosses her down diagonally across the bed.
She looks pleased, but there is still no smile, no laughter. There is only the parted swell of her mouth, the sweet human smell of unmitigated desire as he crawls over her, lowering his face to her belly button. His teeth scrape her hip bone as he takes the material of her black thong in his teeth. She lifts her ass as he moves his hands beneath her and lifts the fabric from between her cheeks with a finger. He backcrawls and drags her underwear down to her thighs, stopping only when she impertinently reaches for them herself.
“You’re no fun,” he says, looking up at her as she throws them across the room.
“No?”
She sits up and puts her hand round his throat as she kisses him again, this time tongue first, guiding him with it to lean his back against the headboard. She straddles him as she reaches behind him for the pillow in his way, tossing it to the floor. Her hand reaches into his boxers for his cock. She strokes it first in her fist and then with the wet lips of her pussy. So this is what comes after “first,” he thinks.
He throws his head back at the sensation of her dripping over him and catches their reflection in the ridiculous mirror over his bed, marvels at the sexy sweep of her hair over the back of her neck, the sensuous wave of her spine as she surfs him effortlessly back and forth. He watches himself grab her ass and she splays her hand around his ear.
“Mulder, stop being a pervert,” she says, kissing him this time so chastely it hurts. “And fuck me.”
She raises herself a bit until the head of his penis is poised to enter her. He holds himself and slips the tip inside, feels his blood rush to meet her, culled by the tight compression of her body. He presses up a little further, using his fingers to open her up and she holds her breath.
“You okay?”
She nods and brings his face to her breasts, arching back to allow him to take one into his mouth. He lays his thumb gently over her clit, circles it and she lets out the breath she’s been holding for the past minute, for the past seven years.
As she sinks, taking him all the way inside, she squints around dilated pupils. She is so small he worries that she might not be able to do this, that they’ll have to stop, and it is this and only this thought that keeps him from coming at the slow, wet uptake of his cock.
Her face relaxes as her body makes a place for him and she begins to move up and down, rolling toward him, her clit looking to make contact with his body rather than his thumb now. He flexes his stomach muscles for her as best he can, grateful for the crunches he does in compulsive batches of forty. As she speeds her pace, he leans his cheek forward to feel her breasts rise and fall against his face, his ear, the skin as smooth – no smoother – than her pantyhose. He drops his jaw open, poised as if to catch raindrops, and she moans when his bottom lip brushes the underside of her breast or her nipple.
Her fingers clutch the back of his head and the noises he has never heard her make come faster, come louder, though they in no way mimic what he’s used to on his tapes. He wonders if he’ll ever watch porn again, or if he’ll pop in this memory of Scully riding him night after night. Sliding within the tight tunnel of his arms, she feels lithe and tiny and yet fills him up. Enthralled, he whispers her name in her ear just to hear it himself. They are wrapped together now bottom to top, fit snugly as stripes on a candy cane, all the way from the base of his cock to the nails in his hair.
“Can you come with me?” she asks earnestly, panting but without seduction, without pretense, and he feels the vibration of her voice against his own chest. “I’m going to come.” Well, if he couldn’t before…
“Yeah,” he says and then kisses her, wanting to be joined in every way possible when it happens. The rim of her mouth presses against his face as she borrows her tongue back, using it to shape a moan into his mouth and he groans back. She bounces harder and faster and then settles as the muscles around his dick contract and convulse, the firm sides of her breasts pressed out against his biceps, the hard curve of her hips under his fingers, every part of her coaxing him to release himself.
In the morning, her leg is still stickily draped over him, her palm curled in the hollow of his chest. He knows her, knows she’ll want to go. A moment in a hospital, an hour in a motel, an evening on a couch, a night in bed – it will take time before she gives him the morning. So he pretends to sleep as she sits up, peeks only briefly at the crack of her ass when she reaches for her clothes. He is sure not to smile when she looks over her bare shoulder.
“I love you too,” she whispers.
And then steps into the bathroom to change.