Title: The Opposite of Impulse
Author: Maria Nicole
e-mail: marianicole29@yahoo.com
Distribution: Anywhere automatic, fine. Anyone who's already been in
contact with me, fine. Anyone else, please let me know where it's
going. Thanks :)
Classification: SR
Keywords: Mulder/Scully romance
Spoilers: The Unnatural, FTF (before Biogenesis)
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not making any money.
Summary: A small town, a broken-down car, a decision.
The Opposite of Impulse
Maria Nicole
"They'll be here in a few hours."
"A few *hours*?" Mulder asked in disbelief.
"Hostage situation going down. They're short staffed. We don't rate."
Mulder kicked the tire of the car, kicked it harder a second time,
and then swiveled around to take in their surroundings. "Assholes,"
he muttered. "First they send us out in a car with a bad
transmission--and don't tell me that was accidental, they probably
snickered behind our backs at offloading the bad bureau car on the
Spookys--and then--"
"Mulder, hostage situation? And it's not like they could have
foreseen that the only tow truck around for fifty miles would be
busy with an accident," said Scully, and wiped the back of
her neck. Jesus, it was hot. The car had been air conditioned, at
least. She looked around and took inventory. One gas station, not air
conditioned. One broken down Bureau car from the local field office.
One sulky partner.
One unseasonable heat wave.
Patches of darkness on the road, the mirage of water caused by heat,
and an almost visible shimmer in the air.
What looked like a restaurant across the road, with a big "Closed--
open again for lunch at 11:30" sign in the window, picnic benches and
tables scattered on the outside. (She checked her watch: 10:38).
According to the sign they'd passed on the way in, 378 residents who
all seemed to be inside their homes, the drone of their
air-conditioning like distant cicadas.
"You want to get out of the heat?" asked Mulder. "We can go on over
there...those tables are at least in the shade."
One good thing about Mulder, he didn't keep up a sulk when faced
by bad circumstances. She rewarded him with a smile.
***
Scully added another packet of sugar to her iced tea, flicking the
packet to rest on her salad plate, and speared a chunk of pineapple
with her fork. "Strawberries over vanilla ice cream," she announced.
"Canned peaches," said Mulder. "She'd put them in a bowl in the
refrigerator a few hours before dinner so that they'd be cold."
"Waldorf salad," Scully countered.
"Huh?"
"You've never had it?"
"Never even heard of it."
"Apple chunks, walnuts, and mayonnaise, I think?"
"Oh, yeah, that. You ever notice how many summer foods have mayonnaise
in them? Weird, since mayo spoils in heat. Potato salad, tuna salad..."
He gestured to his plate and continued, "chicken salad, coleslaw.
You want the other half of this sandwich? I'm not hungry."
She reached for the sandwich with one hand. It was diagonally sliced;
Scully was always embarrassed by how much she preferred the diagonal
slices of restaurant sandwiches. If Mulder's sandwich had had a
festive toothpick stuck through it, she would have been in heaven.
"Celery with spreadable cheese," she said through a mouthful of
chicken salad.
"Blueberries."
"Hot dogs and potato chips. My mother would always makes us eat
vegetables, except when it was really hot. Then we just got potato
chips. Do you want some of this fruit plate?"
"Yeah." He reached for a wedge of cantaloupe. "Um...what else did
we eat in summer. Hamburgers on the grill. Barbecue chicken."
"Tomatoes. My mother grew them; we'd slice them up and eat them
plain."
"Cottage cheese. Are you going to eat yours or not?"
"No. I don't really like the taste. Why, do you want it?"
He briefly scrunched up his face. "No, I just don't want to look at
it. It's all...gloppy."
They both regarded the small bowl of cottage cheese, decorated with
a single snip of parsley.
"We've seen aliens that are less strange than that stuff," said Mulder.
The last time she had seen quite that expression of distaste on
his face, he had been shaking bile off of his fingers. "I mean, *look*
at it, the way it almost quivers, the chunkiness of its texture..."
"Things I never knew about my partner," Scully intoned. "Number eight.
That he has a weird prejudice against cottage cheese."
"I could tell you why, but it'd probably ruin your appetite."
Scully considered him carefully, took another bite of the chicken
salad sandwich, and washed it down with a swallow of iced tea. "All
right, lay it on me. But if it involves kinky sex games, I only want
the outline, not the details."
It involved a seriously spoiled carton of milk that had achieved the
consistency of cottage cheese, an inadvertent drink, and a night of
food poisoning. Described in detail.
She was a pathologist, of course; it didn't ruin her appetite.
He stared at the cottage cheese, as if mesmerized, while he told
the story; it ruined his.
***
There was a spot right under the ceiling fan where the air wasn't
quite as hot, and Scully stopped in the middle of the restaurant,
turned her face up, and closed her eyes in pleasure.
"Yeah, it's hot, isn't it? Hottest weather we've had here in ten
years. It's times like these that I wish they'd spent the money on
air conditioning."
"Maybe they will, after this summer," said Scully, reluctantly
stepping away from the air and moving to the counter, where the girl
working the counter was waving herself with a menu, sending dark
tendrils of hair away from her face. "Can I get two glasses of
lemonade, please?"
"Sure thing. Just add it to your tab, huh?"
"We'll be here for awhile," Scully said wryly.
"It's a shame about the car. But he said they'd come to pick you
up?" The girl, Ellie, nodded towards the window, her ponytail
bobbing, as she took two clean glasses out of the rack and filled
them with ice. Scully automatically followed her gaze to the picnic
tables set up along the wall outside the restaurant, empty now except
for the one where Mulder was sitting.
"In about an hour, I think."
"Here you go, it's fresh squeezed, real lemon, none of that mix
stuff."
"Thanks a lot. We appreciate you letting us stay here while we wait."
"It's not like there are other customers clamoring for your table.
And besides," Ellie said, dimples suddenly appearing as she smiled,
"you were here at lunch time. You saw most of the customers I get
on this shift. I like them, they're old dears, but..." The smile
turned impish, and she nodded towards the window again. "He's a nice
change of scenery."
***
The outside was, maybe, less stuffy than the inside, but not
appreciably cooler, and Scully sighed as she approached their picnic
table. She'd washed her face and peeled off her suit jacket and her
pantyhose in the bathroom, and had been cool for a moment. But the
heat was already descending on her again, and the cloth of her suit
jacket was heavy and hot where it was slung across her arm.
Mulder had slung his own jacket and his dress shirt over the back
of a nearby chair. Clad in t-shirt and pants, he leaned back against
the wall, one arm resting along the table and another on the back of
a chair, one leg on either side of the bench. He *was* nice scenery;
she let her eyes linger on his upturned face, lightly sheened with
sweat, on his closed eyes, on the latent strength in the muscles of
his shoulders and arms, on the elegance of his long fingers, on the
way his body was sprawled out with complete confidence.
He didn't look up as she slung her jacket over the back of the chair,
although he made a little humming noise at the back of his throat to
acknowledge her return. For a moment, she fought the urge to go over
to his side of the table, to kneel on the bench between his parted
legs and press her lips to the hollow of his throat, to run her hands
along the golden-tanned skin of his biceps, his forearms.
She had found that the only way to deal with these impulses was to let
them run their course, allowing them to crystallize into a clear
image that she could then neatly dismiss. In the heat, though, her
mind ran sluggishly, refusing to form and discard any images, leaving
her only with the restlessness.
She sat down safely on the bench on her side of the table. "I got
us lemonade."
He hummed again, but didn't move.
"We've been out in the heat for two hours, Mulder. You don't want
to get dehydrated."
"Don't wanna move," he mumbled. "Too damn hot."
After a moment, she reached for her almost-empty water glass, tilting
it until one of the melting ice cubes was within her reach. She leaned
across the table and touched the ice cube to the middle of his
upturned palm, and he jerked slightly, but then settled back, uncurling
his fingers.
"That feels good," he said, with the simplicity of a child.
"Come on, open your eyes and drink your lemonade."
"It'd do more good if you'd just pour it over my head," he said, but
he opened his eyes and reached for his glass.
She sat sideways on the bench as he was doing, leaning her back against
the wall and stretching her feet out in front of her, kicking off her
high heels so that they thumped on the ground.
The first taste of the lemonade made her close her eyes in pleasure.
Ellie had added the exact amount of sugar that balanced the tartness
of the lemon with sweetness; this, she thought, was the "something
sweet" that she had wanted a year ago, that she had sent Mulder into
the vending room to find. This was every good childhood summer
in liquid form. This was...
"I think I just died and went to Paradise," said Mulder, and she opened
her eyes to find that he was staring at his glass with something that
looked like reverence.
She lifted her glass in a lazy toast. "Told you."
***
"You ever think of living in a small town, Scully?"
"No."
"Seriously?"
"What would I do? Be their resident pathologist?"
"General practitioner. You never thought of it?"
"Not really. I don't think...I think I..." she frowned, wondering if
she could explain to Mulder what had led her to pathology, the
fascination that she had felt for the dissected body. "No."
She watched as three bikes approaches the restaurant, ridden by three
boys who let the bikes fall, glanced incuriously at Mulder and Scully,
and tried to enter the door at the same time.
One of them had red hair and Charlie's childhood face.
Emily's face formed before her eyes, the image sharp and clear this
time, but she wasn't able to dismiss it as she usually would. She
compared this to the earlier, still hazy image of herself and Mulder.
Pain, it seemed, had a higher temperature threshold than pleasure.
"Scully?"
The boys were leaving again, ice cream cones in hand.
"Ice cream," she said. "The ice cream truck. Our mom would give us
money for that sometime. Melissa always had those orange sherbet
push-ups."
Mulder shook his head, puzzled. She sighed and closed her eyes,
bringing the glass of lemonade to rest against her chest, the
condensation cool on the bare skin above her sleeveless green silk
shell, moisture soaking into the fabric. "It's hot. I'm tired, okay?"
She heard Mulder moving, and then felt a touch of wetness against
the pulse at the base of her wrist.
"What?" She opened her eyes.
"Hush," he said, taking hold of her wrist. "I'm just trying to cool
you off." He dipped his hand into a glass of water and then ran
his fingers across her forearm, leaving trails of wet. He dipped his
fingers again.
His face had the serious concentration of a painter as he traced
patterns of water on her bicep, her shoulder, fingers edging under
the fabric of the silk shell.
His touch, rather than the coolness of the water, chased the image
of Emily away.
***
"We missed one summer food earlier, Scully, and it's the one I'm
holding behind my back *right now.*"
She rolled her eyes and looked up at him. "We covered everything
from...from fresh asparagus to garden-grown zucchini."
"A hint...dessert."
She grabbed at one of his hands lazily, and he easily sidestepped,
shaking his head and grinning at her.
"Ice cream," she said.
"We covered that one."
"Sherbet."
"Nope. The quintessential summer treat for every American kid,
come on, you know the answer."
She raised her eyebrow, and tried to peer through the window at
the menu board. Mulder began to hum the theme from Jeopardy.
"Apple pie."
"Not exclusively summer."
"Suffering succotash. I don't know. I give up."
He whipped out two white wrappers from behind his back. "Lime or
orange?"
"Popsicles?"
"Of course, popsicles. Which do you want?"
Lime, of course. She bit her lip...he'd actually gone through the
trouble of going into the restaurant and buying these. He
deserved the lime popsicle. "Whatever you don't want," she said weakly.
He handed one over and sat on the bench by her, and she crossed her
legs to make room for him. "You can have the lime one. Your lips'll
match your shirt."
They sat there companionably, munching on popsicles. Mulder's lips
were turning orange. She twisted around to look at their reflection
in the glass of the window.
"What?"
"Can you imagine what whoever's going to pick us up is going to
*think*?" She gestured vaguely at the window. "I mean, I don't have
on any pantyhose, I'm all sweaty, my hair's up in a rubber band and
it's falling out of that, and my lips are green."
"You look cute."
"Cute?"
"Healthy. Your face is kind of pink, you're smiling, you look...
cute."
"Thank you. When I was a child thinking about what I wanted to look
like when I was grown-up, cute was the adjective that sprang to
mind."
"You fishing for compliments, Scully?"
"You offering them, Mulder?"
"I could probably come up with a few."
His tone was teasing, but he looked like he meant it, and before she
realized it she was leaning over and kissing him, tasting orange
popsicle and lemonade, coolness and sweetness and him.
She didn't move closer or touch him, maybe because of the heat. She
let her lips speak for her, grazing against the side of his cheek,
his jaw, his lips again. He followed suit, his lips cool against her
forehead, her face, her collarbone.
When he pulled away, his face was flushed, and his breathing fast.
He looked away from her, and she watched as he set down his half-eaten
popsicle carefully on the torn white wrapper, and then looked off
in the distance.
She suddenly felt uneasy. "Mulder?"
He turned back to her, his face guarded and cautious. "Your popsicle's
dripping."
She set down her own popsicle and reached for a napkin to wipe off
her hand. "I'm sorry if I overstepped...if that made you
uncomfortable."
He reached for a napkin, dipped it in water, and handed it to her.
"Use this. You didn't make me uncomfortable. That was just...
unexpected."
She swiped at the side of her hand, wiping away the residual
stickiness, feeling sickeningly close to tears.
The hand that touched her chin was gentle. "Not unexpected in a bad
way. Never that. I guess I was wondering what you meant by that,
though."
"What I meant by it." Oh, probably the usual things she meant when
she went around kissing men. Especially any men whom she'd been
partnered with for six years, who had almost kissed her last summer,
who had taught her baseball with his arms wrapped around her, who
had come to the Antarctic after her, who was her closest friend.
Whom she loved.
He waved his hand at their surroundings. "Maybe it was impulse. It's
hot, it's humid, we're in a small town that we've never been in
before and won't be again. Maybe it was just the mood, the heat,
curiosity." He smiled at her, the saddest smile she had ever seen
on his face. "It's okay if that was it--a nice moment, nothing more."
"Is that all you want it to be?" God, was it possible that she had
just humiliated herself completely?
He looked away from her again. "If that's all it was meant to be."
She worked on puzzling that out.
"You know what I am," Mulder said, and he sounded miserable. "You've
always known..."
"You know what I am, too," she said.
He shook his head. "Maybe 85 percent of the time, I can figure you
out. You're a complete mystery to me the rest of the time. Completely
unexpected." He met her eyes for a moment. "Again, not that that's
a bad thing."
And then he looked away again. But she understood it this time.
Not rejection, but fear of rejection, and an attempt at granting her
privacy for this choice.
"This involves both of us," she told him. "It shouldn't just be
me who decides where to go from here."
He rubbed his hands over his face, roughly, and then crossed his
arms on the picnic table. "I made my decision a long time ago. This
is up to you."
"I don't know what I meant, Mulder," she said at last. "It *was*
impulse--"
"Oh," he said, nodding, and she watched his face begin to shutter
away any emotions he might have. She carefully placed her hands on
either side of his face, feeling him still beneath her fingers,
and brushed her lips against his lightly, then more deeply.
"That wasn't impulse," she said quietly. "That meant..."
He turned his face to press a kiss against her palm. "What did it
mean?" he asked, beginning to smile.
"Everything," she breathed. "This means everything."
***
"I'm so sorry that you had to wait. And no air conditioning. That's
really a shame," said Linda Phillips, the secretary who had gotten
the presumably unwelcome task of chauffering the Spookys back to the
office. "I hope you didn't find waiting too boring."
"We managed to pass the time away," said Mulder, with a very private
grin on his face. He had his dress shirt back on, tucked in; she
had slung on her suit jacket. They were standing a circumspect two
feet from each other. When Linda had finally arrived, they had
been sitting discreetly on opposite sides of the table, as they had
been ever since Mulder had rested his forehead on her shoulder and
let out a huff of laughter. ("Your timing sucks, Scully. It's hot,
we're being watching by a bored college student, and some pipsqueak
FBI agent is coming along the road any minute.") He'd left one long,
lingering kiss at the hollow of her throat, and then spent the rest
of the time reading her palm.
The vaguely paranormal excuse to hold hands, she assumed.
"I'll just go pay the cashier," said Scully.
"I'll get what we need from the car," said Mulder.
When she came back out from the restaurant, Linda was waiting by
the car, and Mulder was walking back from the car with their
briefcases in hand, his eyes still shining.
"Do you guys want to go back to the office or straight to your hotel?
It'll be almost 4 when we get there...you might want to call it
quits for the day."
"Hotel," she said.
"Yeah, I bet you just want to be in your own air-conditioned hotel
room and out of those sweaty clothes."
Her eyes met Mulder's as he handed her her briefcase, and they
shared another private smile. "Linda," she said, "you have no idea."
End (1/1)
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