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They came to in wet grass. The silver government issue Ford’s headlights were still on, and guided them, stumblingly back to the side of the road where it was parked. It started without a problem, but Mulder did not put it in gear.
Scully rested her head against the passenger side window while Mulder sat with his hand still on the key in the ignition and stared at the dashboard console. “Do you? - “ she started.
“I - no,” he said. Scully had a piece of grass in her hair. Mulder picked it out and held it a moment indecisively before throwing it on the floor. For some reason, that made her try to smile, and he couldn’t help smiling back.
“My kit!” he suddenly remembered and there was frantic dash for the trunk. He spraypainted an X where the car had stopped, and trecked back out into the grass to mark where they had come to. Scully had the flashlight and followed him into the grass, picking up little bits that might not necessarily belong and dropping them into evidence bags.
It all seemed so implausible and stupid, when a day ago, it would have been momentous. Mulder sat down in the flattened spot in the grass and let his head fall back. It was cloudy, no stars visible. Off in the distance behind some hills, a city’s lights glowed up into the mist. Now Scully was throwing up about fifteen feet away. She never did well with drugs, and they appeared to have been drugged. Mulder didn’t feel so good himself, but he didn’t think it was going to come to anything. He climbed to his feet and trudged to the car to dig out a bottle of water for her when she got finished. She didn’t like help when she was sick. She wouldn’t even let him drive her home when she came down with a fever at the office. He noticed his tie was stuffed into the pocket of his jacket. Whatever had happened, whoever it was, apparently they couldn’t be bothered with a half-Windsor.
She was walking back now, steady on her feet, which he knew had to be an act, and why did she need to put on an act with him anyway? He held out the bottle of water to her, and she spat out a few mouthfuls and swallowed a little. He reached out and combed a few strands of hair off of where they were stuck to her damp forehead.
They decided without argument to go back to their motel. Unsurprisingly, it still had vacancies, even at 2 in the morning. The desk clerk was not pleased to have to abandon his falling apart paperback, but they got their keys, and walked down the hall toward the same rooms they’d had the night before, without their luggage. Scully stopped at her door and so did Mulder. She opened it and waited for him to precede her inside. He sat down on the sagging armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him and looked up in surprise when the remote control dropped into his lap. Scully was standing over him, looking very… Scully. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said, and went.
The same stuff was on that was ever on at 2 in the morning, and Mulder flipped quickly past Twilight Zone reruns and settled on an infomercial about curtain weights. The man and the woman were unreasonably excited about those things, but at least there would be no surprises. Lindsey and Mason finished up extolling the virtues of curtain weights and next up, a very groomed blonde on an evening news set talked about a revolutionary new weight loss medicine while an 800 number flashed. Scully was still in the shower. This seemed like something to worry about, so Mulder got up and knocked on the door.
“What?”
“You’ve been in there a long time.”
“You need the bathroom?”
“No… just… you’ve been in there a long time.”
He heard her sigh even through the lashing water. “Come in, Mulder.”
The steam was thick, but he fixated his gaze on the yellow wall and sat down on the toilet seat. “You ok?”
“There’s remembering something horrible, and then there’s wondering if you are forgetting something horrible.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. She apparently didn’t need one.
Scully shut the water off and Mulder passed her a towel around the shower curtain without being asked. She took an unreasonably long time to get dry.
“Do you want me to leave so you can get dressed?”
“I don’t care.”
Of course she cared, so he let himself out. The television was still going on about weight loss supplements, so he shut it off and tossed the remote next to it before flopping on the bed and kicking his shoes to the floor. Fragmentary images kept coming back to him and none of them made nearly as much sense as they’d made when they were happening. Or seemed to be happening. Mulder suspected Scully would be taking blood from both of them. The Lone Gunmen would probably be able to get it analyzed without drawing any undesirable scrutiny, although they would have plenty of dubiously appropriate questions of their own.
And then there were the reports. They would have to make something up to justify checking out of their motel and checking back in only eight hours later, after having used most of a tank of gas in their rental car going apparently nowhere. They had long since learned that opening any X File concerning themselves was a bureaucratic sinkhole. If sinkholes were lined with bear traps, that is.
She came out wrapped in a towel with another one around her head, which she took off after sitting on the edge of the bed next to Mulder, and began rubbing her hair with it. Exhaustion began to overtake nerves and his vision grew fuzzy and dim as he watched her finish that and start to card her fingers through the shoulder-length tendrils. He barely noticed when she levered him over so she could get under the covers next to him.
Sometime in the night he woke up to go to the bathroom, stripped down to his boxers, and climbed back into bed without really noticing who was there with him.
It was long past dawn when consciousness came to him suddenly and completely, along with the awareness that the weight pressing down on him was far warmer and far heavier than a hotel blanket. And hotel blankets did not breathe softly into the side of one’s neck, or have fingers woven into one’s hair. Nor did hotel blankets ever, insofar as Mulder was aware, shift their hips restlessly and rhythmically against one’s posterior. His morning erection was trapped painfully against the mattress, and he concentrated very hard to figure out whether Scully had any clothing on at all. She did not.
Well, this was a turn of events. How was he going to extricate himself - from under her, from the situation - without making her so uncomfortable that she never spoke to him again? And how was he just going to lie there with her humping his ass, to the point that he was pretty sure he felt a widening circle of dampness forming from his precome. Mulder clamped his lips between his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried not to moan. Maybe if he rolled over suddenly, jumped out of bed, and headed right for the bathroom, Scully would be too disoriented to a. realize what she’d been doing in her sleep, and b. that Mulder had a big leaking hard-on from it that he desperately needed to do something secret about.
It was an idea with potential. The key was not to injure Scully in the process, or wake her. Also, his legs seemed to be wound up in the covers, which could complicate things. He shifted his feet experimentally. Scully began to suck his neck. Oh God.
What was it? Six years he’d been fantasizing about something like this? He wished she would stop. This was making it much more difficult. Oh God, was she biting? She was biting. He was lost. A tiny high pitched noise escaped through his nose and he drove his hips into the mattress. The relief it brought came with more urgency, and there was no way they were getting out of this with dignity and plausible deniability intact because now she was alternating biting and sucking all up and down the side of his neck and grinding her pelvis into his ass. If she was asleep, she must be having a hell of a dream.
Maybe she would stop if he just held still. Maybe she’d finish her dream and roll off him and go deeper into sleep and he could go have a very hot, probably not very long shower. It was not looking good. The hand that was in his hair tightened almost to the point of pain. His feet were trapped in the sheets. His hands were trapped under his head. He could not move, and now she was brushing her lips against the fine hairs of his earlobe before delicately sinking his teeth in.
“Scully!” he yelped involuntarily.
“Mmm?” came the sleepy reply, along with another, gentler bite followed by a soothing tongue that traced the outer part of his ear and made him inhale hard and hump the mattress.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes,” she said, as if he were impossibly dense. “How long have you been awake?”
“Ohhh,” he calculated distracted by the sudden realization that he could feel her breasts against his shoulders and wow were her nipples erect, “About since the neck nuzzling started.”
“Oh my God,” she blurted and was off him and across the bed before he knew what was going on. “I thought you were awake! I wouldn’t have - “
“Wait, why did you think I was awake?” Mulder asked, having a hard time managing both confusion and the sudden release of pressure on his groin. “And also, it’s ok. You can come back here.”
She crept back hesitantly and they lay on their sides face to face. “I woke up when you came back to bed. You climbed right in next to me and spooned me. And then I woke up again, I must have moved, and you said my name and hugged me.”
She looked so uncertain, with swollen lips and the sun shining through the disarray of her hair. Mulder reached up and stroked her cheek. “I bet I did that. But I was asleep when I did it.”
“That’s not all you did,” she said with a smirk, gaining confidence from his touch.
“Oh?” he let his fingers drift from her cheek down to her collarbone, hidden underneath the covers, and trace the contour of her shoulder.
“You have wandering hands, Mulder.”
“Want me to stop?”
“No. And I didn’t mean now. Your hands were wandering in your sleep. That’s why I thought you were awake.”
“And where did they wander, Scully?”
“You had them on my stomach.” She smiled as if delighted to be letting him in on the secret. Mulder moved his hands there and rested them on her belly. “You weren’t just holding them there. You were touching,” Scully said. Mulder moved his fingers slowly along the slightly rounded curve of her belly, the barest tickling pressure. Scully’s lips parted. “Yes, a lot like that. But somewhat higher.” Mulder’s eyebrows went up. He was a dog in his sleep, and evidently she liked it. He stroked up higher, and she looked back up at him. He held her eyes, and saw no fear or hesitation there. She didn’t flinch and he slid even higher and felt the bottoms of her breasts against his knuckles. “Yes,” she whispered, and her eyes shut. He brushed his knuckles against the impossible softness, and daringly cupped one. His fingers surrounded yielding velvet fullness. The nipple poked into his palm. “Yes,” she said urgently, and he squeezed. The tiny animalistic sound she made brought him back to his own surging need.
Her mouth was open to his, and what a surprise, she was as orally fixated as he was, trembling with the intensity that was building between them as they darted quick brushes of the lips between catching their breath together. She hitched herself closer to him, and now his cock was pressed up against her thigh. His hand was now trapped between them, but he managed to pinch her nipple as he came in for another kiss, and she turned demanding, mouth open for their tongues to meet.
She caught him with her leg and pulled him close, and he felt the moist heat of her cunt burning though his thigh, even as he pressed his cock rhythmically against hers, and this was perilously close to being like teenagers, but he was almost 40 and she definitely knew exactly what she was doing, and what was she doing with her tongue? and another surge of precome left him sliding deliciously against her skin.
He adjusted them to give his arm some freedom of movement, pulling her closer to him and a little higher up so that he could reach the wet curls between her legs. The natural hair gave him an extra means of teasing, and he did that, stroking and parting the little twists all the way from the apex and down the sensitive labia until she lost her presence of mind and her mouth stilled, open and panting against his cheek.
At the deepest part, he let his finger slip in and taste the abundant slick, and spread it up the delicately convoluted furrow of her inner lips. Fascinated by the way she sucked in her bottom lip, he repeated the action. He felt the ache in his groin radiate jolts to his palms and soles, his lips and the crown of his head, but he held on and traced his two fingertips around the tiny out-jutting that they had detected on the first pass. She shifted her hips with a luxuriant, half-vocalized sigh. That much? From indirect stimulation? To satisfy his curiosity, he barely skimmed over the head. The throaty yowl she emitted confirmed it. Direct stimulation was going to be too much. Further investigation, conducted over his libido’s insistence on now, do it now, taste her now, sink into her NOW, yielded up the fact that gente play with the clitoral hood did nothing for her, but she very much liked pressure at the root and to either side of her clit, and moaned loud and long when he pinched the little shaft and jerked her. So, skittish when he was delicate with her, but a slut for the firm touch. Maybe that had been the problem all along? he thought abstractedly.
And that was when she reached down and grabbed him at the root. In one move she’d wrested back the initiative, and she was smart, because at the same time she’d plied his frenum and corona with deft fingers, she’d gripped the base of his shaft almost painfully hard, which was probably the only thing that kept him from coming in huge ropy gouts all over her hands and belly. As it was, all he could do was shut his eyes and watch the pyrotechnics on the back of his lids as she urged more precome from his slit and swirled it over the head.
He forced his eyes open enough to watch her face and found her inches from his, flushed and eyes unfocused, with a little smile on her lips. He had to kiss it. As the kiss deepened, both their hands stilled, and he finally brought his up to cradle the back of her head as they restively pressed their hips together. Paradoxically, it was easier now to hold back the need to come, although the sensations were growing stronger and sweeter.
He felt himself pressed into the mattress, absurdly pliant under the forceful maneuvers of the partner who, standing in heels, came up to his nose just barely. She had him on his back and was crawling up him, dragging her large pink nipples against his chest, maximizing skin to skin contact until she was looking up into his face and he could feel her steaming against his cock. And then with a little jump and a wriggle she had sunk down on him. Her hands were between them, adjusting his angle, her seating and Mulder was profoundly aware of every nerve ending from root to tip, engulfed in her pressing heat.
His hands were on her hips, urging her to move, but she was taking her own sweet time, and should he have expected otherwise? But she took his hands in hers and used his arms to brace herself as she began to churn herself on him in earnest. Her eyes were closed and her lips parted, and other than that she wore an expression of deep concentration. Mulder thought it endearing, and also needed to see it undone. Gently transferring both her hands to his one, continued to provide her the leverage she needed while the other hand was free to stroke from her hip up her side, to cup a breast and then tease the nipple. He liked the way that changed the pitch of her tiny noises, and the way she rocked back on him even more emphatically. His hips rose to meet her, and for a minute he had to concentrate on the minute sensations of her skin against his fingertips in order to hold against the surge of his impending orgasm. It continued to build, but for the moment he was riding its edge, in control.
He brought Scully towards him and she easily adjusted her angle to accommodate him, so that he could raise his head to her breast. He breathed over the nipple, brushed his mouth against it and felt it tighten in anticipation, but he bypassed it and instead bit the underside of her breast. The diminutive noises she’d been making were a thing of the past, and she howled, suddenly rising up and slamming herself down against him, hoarse and breathless sounds forced out of her in rhythm to her riding.
And he was lost, gazing up into the shining ruddy tangle of her hair in the beam of sunlight, driven well past the point of control or wanting to control, enveloped in her fire, and steadily subsumed by the onslaught of bliss until it took him up and left his flickering ashes to drift back down towards earth.
Some drifting eons later, she was lying on his chest. He was pretty sure that the expression on his face was somewhere between euphoric and goofy. Hers was unreadable. “I’ll race you to the shower,” he offered, not sure if he could feel his feet.
She wordlessly tumbled out of bed, somehow found her feet, and headed for the bathroom. Mulder followed after, bemused.
The shower was surprisingly goal oriented. They gravitated toward each other, turning touch into purposeful activity with the tiny hotel soap and inadequate water pressure. But there was no tracing strands of memory back through the events of the morning without following them to what had happened - or may have happened or seemed to have happened - the night before.
“This was possibly the most stupid thing I could have done,” Scully said as they toweled off.
“We could have done,” he corrected.
“No, I. I’ve known you were in love with me. I’ve decided that it’s not wise; it’s not healthy; it’s not safe. and I gave into a moment of weakness and broke down the fragile membrane that was all there was holding back this - .”
“Tidal wave of lust?”
“Among other things,” she said dryly.
“You think that this has changed things?” Mulder asked, not sure if he wanted her to say yes.
“How can it not?”
“Let me ask it a different way. You think I wasn’t compromised before we had sex?” She was silent. “Then maybe you think you’re compromised now?”
“What’s done is done. And will be done again, I have no doubt.” She left, and Mulder stood there holding a damp towel, let down and hopeful and craving a long, solitary funk that he was not going to get any time soon.
They got dressed in their clothes from last night, since their luggage was still in the car. That made them get quiet, and the quiet lasted fifteen miles to a faded little diner where they didn’t mess around, but just put a coffee pot on your table. The J. Edgar Hoover building had a file on this place, keyword “Wheaton, Nebraska--do not miss.” The coffee had cinnamon and bitter cocoa in it and the eggs came with fried tomatoes and mushrooms, and toast slices an inch thick. This kept them companionably but uncommunicatively occupied for a good while.
Mulder’s phone rang from his jacket pocket, and then Scully’s from the table beside her coffee cup. They met each other’s eyes, and she grimaced and answered hers. “No, sir, we’re not in Milwaukee, we’re in a diner… Wheaton, Nebraska… No… Yes… We’ll pick up a flight in Omaha… It’ll all be in the report, sir.”
They paid up and left. “We’re not actually going to Milwaukee, are we?” Scully asked resignedly, about a mile down the road, and not in the direction of Omaha.
“I know how much you love to crack open a cold one, but don’t you think this is more worth our time than a murder autopsy?”
Scully sighed. “What next? Kirlian photography of the scene of the incident? Hypnotic regression? Visiting the garden expo to find out what the repressed housewives saw? Blurry photos from the comic bookstore weirdo?”
“All good ideas,” he said, handing her the map from the driver’s door pocket.