Route 9 unfurled in an endless ribbon of car dealerships,
Dunkin' Donuts', and heavy silence. Scully stared out her window
and tried to ignore just how hungry, cold, and tired she was. From
the corner of her eye, she could see Mulder in profile, as
shuttered and withdrawn as the out-of- business gas station
flashing past them.
He hadn't said a word after leaving Detective Fong's office.
Fong had walked them to the car, shaken and full of promises to
have her girlfriend call him tonight. Mulder had nodded curtly,
sliding into the driver's seat while staring at her with very
poorly masked suspicion. Scully had been the one to thank Fong and
tell her they'd be in touch. Standing under the streetlights, Fong
looked too young and tired.
"Shit," Mulder hissed as the car suddenly jerked and
swerved. "Sorry," he said in her general direction.
"Highway divider. I didn't see it." She turned her head
in time to glimpse concrete, white like a sharp bone.
"Mulder,--" she said, the way she did at the
beginning of almost every one of her sentences.
"I'm fine, Scully," Mulder cut in, stressing the
"fine" with a particularly vicious edge.
In her mind, diplomacy fought a brief, futile skirmish with her
fraying temper. "You almost drove into a highway
divider," she told him. "I doubt that counts as `fine'
in anybody's book."
"I told you. I'm fine," he said. Against the glare of
an oncoming car's headlights, he looked like he was snarling.
Scully closed her eyes, willing the dull aching in her stomach
away. It was as if they were back in the first months of their
partnership and he was still Spooky Mulder, sometimes playful,
sometimes hostile, always poised on the edge of nasty.
They drove the rest of the way without saying a word.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulder's knocks were like a private Morse code. Short, sharp
raps and he'd come into the room pulsing with excitement. Measured
beats and he'd enter the room sad- eyed and she knew they had lost
the evidence, the suspect, the truth again. The three slightly
syncopated taps were a recent development. They meant she was
faced with a late- night Mulder who looked at her from under
too-long lashes.
Tonight, Mulder knocked once, so softly she almost didn't hear.
She was in the middle of changing into her pajamas, but she opened
the door to her motel room anyways. In the dim hallway lights,
Mulder was all shadowed hollows and bleak eyes. A cold lunar
landscape. He held a big paper bag in one hand and stared at her
bare feet.
"I got you something to eat," he explained to the
carpeting near her toes.
Even a few months ago, it would have been easy to lie politely
and send him on his way, but she couldn't, now, when she knew
exactly how the small, knobby bone at the nape of his neck felt.
She wanted to smooth out his frown and work the stiffness from his
tensed shoulders. She took the paper bag. "There's enough
here for two," she said, offering their oblique version of an
apology.
Mulder looked at her with real alarm. "That's not what I
meant," he said.
"That's what I mean though," she told him. Her
stomach growled softly at the smell of sharp vinegar and spicy
black bean sauce.
"I'm probably going to be bad company tonight," he
said, but she could feel him lean in towards the room like a plant
hungry for the sun.
"I will too," she said, surprised by her own
bluntness. "But--," and she had no idea what to say
next.
"We could be bad company together?" Mulder
half-asked, half-said. The corners of his mouth crept up in an
approximation of a smile.
The last time she'd seen him smile had been a week ago, Sunday
morning, over the kind of haphazardly improvised breakfast only he
could cook. They'd carried his walnut and raspberry pancakes back
to his bed where he fed her and read the headlines from The New
York Times in funny voices. She'd been determinedly chewing her
way through a forkful of pancake when she'd bitten into a
still-frozen raspberry. Loudly. "Sorry, Scully," he'd
said, starting to laugh. "The look on your face." Then
the phone had rung and an hour later they had been on their way to
Boston.
She wanted to see him smile again. She wanted both of them to
smile again.
"One is the loneliest number," she sang in her
tone-deaf way.
His eyes gleamed a startling pure green. "I'll have all
the little red barbecued pork pieces. I know how you hate
those," he said and she was the one to smile as he stepped
into the room.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
They ate surprisingly good Chinese takeout and watched the ten
o' clock news in a careful, neutral silence. Mulder flipped to
another channel whenever one of the somber news anchors mentioned
Sarah Tollman. He sat next to her on the bed, slumped against the
headboard in his dress shirt and suit-pants.
Scully chased a lone egg floret around her container of hot and
sour soup and tried to focus her attention on the weatherman.
"Cold and gray for the next five days," he promised
sheepishly, as if he were responsible for the chance of snow
tomorrow.
A cell phone trilled and they both jumped. It was Mulder's
phone. "Mulder," he said around a mouthful of black bean
shrimp. He put his takeout container down and got up from the bed.
His head was a dark silhouette against the desk lamp's harsh
corona.
"When?" he asked in a short, sharp tone. He kept his
back to her, but she could see his shoulders tense as if against a
hard punch.
"I'll be there," he said. He rubbed at the back of
his neck so hard she almost expected to see his skin come off.
"I know where it is," he said. "I appreciate it,
Fong." After he hung up, he stood with the phone in his hand
for another minute before he put it down on the nightstand.
"That was Fong," he said unnecessarily. He still
hadn't turned around to face her yet. "She talked
to-Samantha. I'm supposed to meet her tomorrow."
There were so many questions Scully wanted to ask and yet she
asked the least important one. "When?"
"Tomorrow afternoon at one," he said, head bent,
fingers tracing the grain of the nightstand's wood.
She chose her next words carefully. "Where are you
meeting?" she asked.
He turned around, but didn't meet her eyes. "A coffee
house in Somerville," he said.
She sounded frosty and unyielding even to her own ears. "I
see."
Mulder's shoulders slumped even further as he stared at a point
near her feet. "It's been a long day," he said softly.
"I'm going to sleep."
Because her head still hurt and because his untucked dress
shirt hung on him like a deflated balloon, she simply nodded and
let him go.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Three a.m. and the same questions ran through her mind in an
infinite loop.
Mulder, what are you going to ask this woman when you see her?
Mulder, what are you going to tell this woman when you see her?
Mulder, do you think this woman really is Samantha? Mulder, where
will I be when you meet with this woman?
She stared into the darkness and tried not to close her eyes.
The few times she did, she saw either lifeless blue eyes and
blood-clouded water or pigtails and little girl's overalls. It was
far better to watch the alarm clock mark off the minutes and hours
in its inexorable way.
Mulder lay next to her, curled away on his side. She couldn't
really tell whether or not he was asleep. They hadn't spent enough
nights together for her to know bone- deep how he breathed when he
slept, if he held his body still during sleep, if he always came
out of his dreams with a twitch. She wondered what, if anything,
he could say about her nighttime habits.
A hand brushed her hip. Mulder turning onto his back. She
didn't move as he smoothed a gentle hand over her hip again.
"Sorry, Scully," he said softly enough so that if she
were asleep she wouldn't hear him.
"I'm awake, Mulder" she said in that same hushed
tone.
"You can't sleep either?" he asked. The sheets
rustled as he turned to face her.
"I just can't stop thinking."
He nodded against the sweep of a passing set of headlights.
"Me too," he said. "I'll show you mine if you'll
show me yours."
His tired voice didn't match his teasing words, but she still
felt a brief rush of warmth. For a moment, they were back in his
apartment two months ago and she was watching his mouth tug up
into a suddenly shy smile. "Show me yours and I'll show you
mine," he'd drawled and this time she'd taken him up on the
challenge. "Oh, Scully," he'd said, eyes wide as she
slid her shirt off her shoulders. And then, he'd pulled his own
shirt off so that they were, finally, skin to skin.
She reached for his hand in the dark. "I don't even know
where to start," she confessed. "There's so much."
His fingers rubbed against hers, restless, and he was quiet for
so long she was sure she'd offended him somehow. Then, he said,
"I don't know what to believe anymore."
She knew this, had known this ever since Mulder had first told
her about how he met and then lost Samantha all in one night. She
knew this every time she faced a Mulder whose world had now
narrowed down to a military conspiracy. Yet, she still felt a dull
pain, like the day-after ache left by a hard blow. His voice was
so small and so lost. She wrapped her fingers around his, stilling
them. "I know," she said, soothing the back of his hand
with tiny strokes.
He laughed and even his laugh was barely more than an exhausted
puff of air. "Do you, Scully?" he asked. "Do you
really?"
She hadn't that night he had told her about Samantha. Not
really. She had only been back home a week from the hospital and
he had stopped by her apartment with mango ice cream, one of those
Mulderish gifts that could have meant anything from a friendly
gesture to a prelude to a declaration. Sitting next to him on her
couch, she had thrilled to the way that thick, sweet cold slid
down her throat. She was so hungry all the time. Whatever she ate
burst into sharp flavors in her mouth.
Mulder had spooned bites of ice cream into his mouth slowly and
deliberately. His eyes, when they didn't track the flash of her
spoon, were sad and far away. After they had finished, he had
followed her into the kitchen and watched her wash their ice-cream
bowls. Without looking, she had known when he had gone completely
still next to her.
"The night before the hearing, I saw Samantha," he
had said, looking hard at her when she turned to face him. "Cancerman
arranged for the two of us to meet. He wanted me to come work for
him."
It had just been too much too soon. That was how she tried to
explain her reaction to herself later that night. Somehow, in an
instant, that cold sweet lingering in her mouth had frozen over
and gone sour. "We've seen this kind of thing before,
Mulder," she had said in what she thought was a calm voice.
"Was it really Samantha?"
Brittle anger had sparked in his eyes. "I doubt that
matters. She said she needed time before she could figure out
whether she wanted to see me again. She just about ran out of the
diner we were in."
Even now, she regretted the things she had said and left
unsaid, but she had no idea how to make any of it right. So, she
traced patterns into his palm and circled around the things that
kept them both awake at night. "These past few days,"
she said haltingly. "It feels like everything's been turned
upside down. Inside out."
Mulder shifted so that they were forehead to forehead.
"We'll get the people who did this, Scully. We will," he
promised.
And this was where she didn't believe him. Couldn't. Because
just as she would never know how it felt to meet and lose a sister
in one night, he would never know how it felt to wake up just at
the moment Sarah Tollman died, and feel the cold steel of a razor
and the warmth of trickling blood as clearly as if she had been
there. She couldn't echo him and she didn't want to argue.
Instead, she pushed her head into the hollow where his neck and
shoulder met. He made a quiet, muffled noise somewhere between a
sigh and a moan and wrapped his arms tight around her.
They lay together in silence, arms and legs entangled like some
strange, two-headed monster. Just like this afternoon, his skin
was dry and fever-hot and she could almost hear the tension
buzzing through him. She ran her hands down his back, trying to
unfurl the coiled tendons and knotted muscles she found there. He
was all hard angles tonight. His elbow jabbed into her ribs and
the crook of his knee could leave a bruise. She doubted she felt
any softer herself.
"Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a long
day," Mulder said into her hair.
"I can't get to sleep," she said. The words came out
urgent and needy.
"I can't get to sleep either," he said, voice dipping
low. He rubbed his cheek against her shoulder and she shuddered at
the prickly drag of stubble on skin.
She pushed her face harder into his neck. She just wanted to
stop thinking. She just wanted.
Mulder cupped the back of her head, tilted her so that they
were face to face again. His mouth tasted salty and warm like sea
water. His tongue twisted against hers, muscular and eel-like,
sending a slow column of heat up her spine. Two months, ten nights
together, and every time she kissed him he tasted brand new.
He broke their kiss long enough to pull her on top of him. She
bracketed him with her arms and legs and planted slow,
open-mouthed kisses along his collarbones and shoulder- blades.
The heat in her spine was spreading so rapidly she could have
sworn her very nerve endings had caught fire.
They would be different than they were this afternoon, she told
herself. No fierce grappling. No frenzied crash of bodies that
only led to a short spurt of release as comforting as a sneeze.
She lapped at the patch of soft skin right under his stomach.
Without looking up, she knew he was watching her. His mouth might
hang slack because of the way she snaked her tongue up and along
his inner thigh, but his eyes would be a clear, sharp green.
She took him into her mouth and hollowed her cheeks. He was
pulsing heat and hardness around her lips and this filled an
emptiness she hadn't even known was there. He tasted like the sea
here too. Salt and murk. She lifted her head and their eyes
locked. Mulder's fingers tangled hard into her hair. "In you,
Scully," he said between ragged breaths.
He pulled her back up, kissed her hard until she was limp and
breathless against him. Different, she promised herself as he
turned her over onto her back. She pressed her lips against his
again. When he slid into her, the beauty in the curve of his neck
and the arch of his back were unbearable.
"Let go, Mulder," she whispered against his temple
right before the hot, slow waves pulled her under. Dimly, she felt
him stiffen, shudder, and drape himself over her. She opened her
eyes and stroked her fingers through tousled brown hair. He turned
his head to face her, eyes still closed. She shivered at the
tenderness that shot through her at the sight of him, sweat-sheened
and caught in the aftershocks of his orgasm like a slightly
blinded, friendly sea mammal.
Love, she thought but did not say. Instead, she smoothed her
hands down his slick, loose-spined back, pressed kisses against
his paper-thin eyelids. His arms came around her and this time
they fit against each other.
They fell asleep together. |