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***
It’s Mulder’s idea to find a motel to stop at before they go visit Billy Miles. Scully has been clenching her jaw for twenty minutes, trying not to let her teeth clack its demands. But he pulls into a lot with a vacancy sign anyway, points out a rickety sign promising laundry machines. He smiles and sighs as if his luck is finally turning around.
The night manager’s shift is ending and they have trouble explaining that they only want the room for the remainder of the previous night. The sun is stirring and stumbling through the thick Venetian blinds of the all-beige office, insisting that night no longer exists, cannot be paid for.
“We only need one room, just for a couple hours,” Mulder explains and the manager raises his eyebrows. It’s not that kind of place, his expression says, but they all know it actually is.
“To nap and clean up,” she says quickly, nearly blushing hot enough to dry her hair. She wants to tell the guy two rooms, she wants to pull out her badge and tell the whole story of how she came to find herself beside this lovable lunatic, chasing down alien abductees.
Mulder opens the door to their room and tells her she can have the shower first. She gathers her things, feels his eyes on her, his gaze as wet as the rain in her hair. She figures his staring is the habit of a loner, a product of his attention to detail, the cause and result of a photographic memory. Nonetheless, it feels personal, humbles and emboldens her at once.
“Hand me your clothes when you get them off so I can get them in the washing machine.” She strips behind the flint-thin door and balls everything up in her forearm. The fabric holds so much water she might as well be rolling a bowling ball through the crack in the door. She’s showing him only her face and one bare shoulder but he levels that stare as if she’s showing him everything. She fidgets, wants to either yell at him or invite him in.
“Don’t rush,” is all he says. “I’ll call over in twenty minutes when the morning manager takes over and ask for a late checkout.”
He flaunts everything she believes to be true of the world – that there is nothing science cannot explain, that sharing a bed with a man you find attractive means sex, that checkout times are impenetrable tenets of the universe.
“Is that a thing? They do that?”
“Of course,” he says. “Haven’t you ever asked for a late checkout?”
“Never needed one.”
“You haven’t really lived until you’ve asked for a late checkout,” he jokes with a hint of self-deprecation, perhaps his way of apologizing for the fire, the storm, for everything. But when she steps under the scalding hot water and feels her stomach jump, her bones tingle, she thinks the lovable lunatic just might be right.
*****
The first time she gives him the morning, they’re in Los Angeles. She wakes in Mulder’s hotel room, the empty bed with her name on it acting merely as a decoy, dried bubbles around the bathtub her only alibi. The truth is she spent the night here, drunk on bureau-expensed sake, gripping four hundred thread count sheets while Mulder made love to her. Twice.
She stifles the urge to pee as she feels his lips on her back, between her shoulders, down her spine, her feet against his quadriceps as he nuzzles the down of her lower back. Her headband is across the room, her clothes dribbled like pebbles between the door and the bed, markers to show them the way home. But she doesn’t care if she ever goes home. She tastes of sex and alcohol, of someone else’s life, and she wants it whether the ending turns out to be fable or fairy tale.
His hands track up the front of her body and she laughs when her appetite churns beneath his fingers. He has heard her stomach growl many times, but she doesn’t think he’s ever felt it.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“I need to go find a bagel somewhere. And get back to my room to shower.”
“I’ve already ordered room service. I hope pancakes will suffice.” He scoots back up to put his face in the crook of her neck, his hands lightly cupping her breasts. The way he touches her tits is magic, makes them feel both smaller and more substantial at once.
“Oooh, room service. Fancy.” She turns her face up to let him kiss her and dried eyeshadow falls from her lids before her eyes, reminding her of dust under a spotlight. She blinks hard as flecks land itchily around her corneas. His erection is prominent and pleading just under her backside. “What if someone sees that you’ve ordered for two?”
“You think you’re the only woman in LA I could have up here? Haven’t you seen Pretty Woman?”
“Mulder, did you just compare me to a prostitute?”
“Well you are always out of the bedroom before I wake up.” She shoves a pillow at his chest, biting her bottom lip, and rolls over to smother him with it. He hums like a songbird as her legs fall in the gaps of his own. She stretches her arms out on either side of his ears, a slow drag of her body toward his face. He clenches his jaw when she pulls the pillow out from between them and blankets him in skin. She cocks her head at the nightstand.
“Go ahead, Mr. Big Shot. Call down for a late checkout,” she tells him.
***
She wakes to the sound of him moving around a room she doesn’t recognize and realizes she will not recognize her waking surroundings for some time. Maybe at some point all unrecognizable places become one in their foreignness, become recognizable in their sameness.
There is the crinkle of a plastic bag; he’s been out already. She begins to dream of convenience store purchases that might help her forget. Ho-hos, Diet Coke, licorice, cigarettes. When she pads past him, he reaches for her waist and pulls her in to aggressively kiss the side of her head. She peeks into the bag.
“Did I do good?” he asks, seeing her smile. He’s bought everything but the cigarettes, which he has replaced with a three dollar bottle of bleach. She flinches, not ready to acknowledge its purpose, and reaches backwards for his face, stroking the stubble on his cheek in adoration.
She’s all in holy white in the bathroom mirror, listening to herself spit as the old plumbing wearily sucks down the toothpaste of yet another stranger. Eager to examine last night’s damage, she undresses and follows the trail of bruises from her neck to her hips, the hickeys across her chest and behind her ear. She runs her hands under her ass and feels tender spots along her sitz bones. It is as if he’s been finger-painting her body.
“Come,” she hears him say and startles, still not used to his voice peppering her private silences. Her lower body swivels a little at the sound of him saying that word. But just as in her real life, her old life, there are things to be done. They can’t simply lie around having sex all day.
“Should we dye my hair before we go?”
“Later.” She is hugely relieved, as if a few hours will help her adjust to the idea of being someone else. She lets him tug her wrist and revels in the soreness under his hand. He has never pinned her the way he did last night and she knows that he did it for her.
He turns on the dusty alarm clock radio, she assumes for the AM stations, to find relevant news, to make plans for the weather and their travels, but instead he flicks the knob to FM and fumbles with the tuner till there’s an old song playing, soft and staticky, full of promises, something Carole King may or may not have written.
They lay together with his soft-clothed body against her naked skin and she realizes he will be dressed like this all the time now, in jeans, in t-shirts. The man she fell in love with wore suits, though she guesses even then he was a cowboy, an outlaw. He feeds her licorice and strokes his fingers over her body, carefully avoiding the pink and purple marks, cooing and tsking as if he weren’t the one who left them there.
“What are we doing, Mulder? Don’t we have to go?”
He pulls her into his chest like a stem drawing up its most velvety petal. She listens as his heart finds the downbeat of the song so easily it might have joined the band, might’ve written the song.
“This is going to get hard,” he says.
She begins to softly sing-speak the lyrics she didn’t realize she knew so well.
“I missed your singing.” She would normally call this a lie, but she has missed sounds too, so she believes him, keeps singing for him.
“Let’s get a late checkout,” he says in the pause between songs. “The world can be saved one hour later.”
***
She chides herself for being dramatic the first time she leaves their home for a hotel room. But drama requires an audience and the whole point is that she can’t seem to get one. They’ve stayed in hundreds of soulless places like this together. The Hilton Garden Inn, she told him, though it could just as easily have been an Embassy Suites, a Ramada, a Best Western. This stay is different, it’s special – there is no case coming together, only them, coming apart.
She’s in her pajamas when the knock comes at her door and she’s self conscious that their formality lends her actions an air of indifference. He looks neither sorry nor angry when she answers, a sweaty grey t-shirt and the half beard he’s been neither growing nor grooming. His eyes are sharp triangles, webbed in his own tiny and yet insurmountable misery. Wordlessly, she lets him in and he lies down beside her, their bodies on the wrong sides of the bed. Lately, they are both on the wrong sides of everything.
When she wakes up, they haven’t moved, he is stiffly spooning her and she dares not move. Her brain feels as though she didn’t sleep, as though she hasn’t slept in weeks, and she worries herself with the thought that this is how Mulder feels all the time.
He slips his hand under her the back of her pajama shirt and it feels awkward, an instrument, an entity. These days, it is more at home amongst the couch cushions than on her body. He puts it flat against the spot where her tattoo sits, judging her from its permanent throne. It is the opposite of the way he has always touched her since the day they met; it is devoid of charge.
“You said you’d never leave me,” he says, and it is an accusation rather than an expression of attachment. She says nothing and closes her eyes, tries to disappear into some other moment in their life together when she would never have considered what she is now considering.
“I don’t know how much longer I can take it,” comes her voice. The fact that she doesn’t recognize it is something of a comfort - she hasn’t recognized him either for some time now. He nods into her hair like he understands, but she doesn’t want him to. She wants him to fight for her, fight for himself. He is willing to be everyone’s hero except his own.
She reaches for the phone on the nightstand, momentarily losing contact with him for the first time in seven hours. She murmurs politely into the receiver, but it is a Tell rather than a Request.
“I need a late checkout. Yes, that’s fine, thank you.”
She takes her spot back for its stolen hour, continues to lie motionless in the tormented hull of his body.
***
They are somewhere in Florida, deep in the Everglades, trying once again to explain the inexplicable. He spent all day yesterday chattering about his theories, his eyes bright, his bottom lip chewed raw in pursuit of answers, and he plans to question some people before they leave town. She’ll question anyone he wants, tolerate any humidity, hell, she’ll go wrestle alligators, so long as he sits in a rumpled suit, eagerly occupying the edge of a paisley coverlet. He looks like himself. He sounds like himself.
She places her bag next to his in the doorway and comes to stand between his legs. Her hands go to his shoulders, moving under his jacket. He feels like himself.
“You seem wary, even for you,” he says. “Do you have any other theories?”
“I’m not wary of your theory. Well, not any more than usual.”
“No?”
“No. I’m wary of you.”
She’s expanding in the heat, afraid she’ll breathe and pop the buttons off her short-sleeved blouse. He beats the heat to the job, opening the top two and kissing her there. This thing between them started the day he cut his foot open and she went over to take care of him. It’s been like their second honeymoon, except that they never had one to begin with.
“Just come home already,” he says for what seems the hundredth time before they lose themselves in the kiss. She has neither refused nor accepted when she finds herself kneeling, fully dressed, taking him into her mouth.
His breath comes in punches, tongue taking jabs at her name. He threads his hands in her hair, not guiding her, but keeping her company, as she licks and sucks. He tastes like himself.
He reaches down for the third and fourth buttons of her blouse, finds both nipples in no time and she moans with her mouth full. When he comes, he moves his hands to the bed protectively, digs his feet into the floor and scrapes his heels for traction. She brings a hand to the foot she sewed up, trying to still it as it bucks beneath her palm. He keens back on the bed in oblivious satisfaction.
“Holy Christ, Scully.” She examines the blood oozing out of the opened stitch, gives a doctor’s order in place of pillow talk. She reserves this particular bedside manner for him.
“Mulder, call down and tell them we need later checkout. I have to clean this up.”
***
She had no idea he was lying when he told her he had an X-File for them in Nevada. He teases her, even now, in bed, calls her gullible, tells her she’s lost her edge. She smiles and flirts, gives little shoves, reminds him that all his cases sound equally made-up to her.
It is a stolen weekend in a hotel on the strip that’s gilded and overlit, dripping with frivolousness, just a few floors above buffets and strippers and casinos. What irony, she thinks, that their reunion should become real in this place where nothing else is.
He paws at her outer thigh and she waits for the surprise to sail across his brow.
“I didn’t take you to bed in this.”
“No. You didn’t.” He pushes the covers down and she leans up on an elbow to give him a better look. A second skin that stops high on her legs, spaghetti straps and wired cups, the material nothing more than cheap spandex shaped into a lacy pattern. Even the lace here is fake. She feels hot and young in it, younger than she remembers feeling when she was actually young.
He licks his lips and runs his hands all over her as she sits up and theatrically throws one thigh over his body. She intends to give him a show better than one he can pay for downstairs. The material rides even further up to make room for his body.
“You packed this for a case?”
“No. I got it down at the boutique while you were in your orgasm-induced coma.” It’s a gentle reminder that he owes her one.
“Don’t worry. I’m going to do it the way you like it, the long way,” he says running one hand up her back, trilling lightly over the material. His other arm reaches around her thigh, his longest finger winding its way inside her body in slow circles, warming her like butter in a pan. He brushes his nose at her breasts, brings her nipples to attention. Her body slouches into a lazy S and she thinks the long way. His tongue. Different fingers. His tongue and his finger. His cock. She closes her eyes and whimpers at the endless bounds of his creativity.
“Are you sure we have a late checkout?” she drawls as she spills over his chest to kiss him, touching his lips with her fingers.
“Of course,” he says and sucks her ring finger, curling his tongue around the gold band there. He pulls it off with his lips and plays with it in his mouth, rolling it, tasting it, showing it to her. She rides his hand and struggles to speak coherently.
“What do you mean, of course?”
He brings one breast to his mouth and pulls the lacy cup down. She gasps at the introduction of each new texture – his lips, the gold, his tongue, the gold again, cold and hard and curved. Half-smiling, he manages to pull the tip of her nipple through the band with his teeth and she nearly comes. This is the kind of creativity she was talking about. He quickly moves on to his next trick, tucking the ring in his cheek with a wet clicking sound and underhanding her knees so he can slide beneath them. The metal interferes with his diction, his tongue lisping dead center between her thighs. She holds her breath, forgetting what it was she asked him. Only the answer matters.
“It comes with the newlywed package.”