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“Hand over the sports section, woman.”
“I know your mother taught you better manners than that.”
He side-eyed her. Of all her various incarnations carefully and painstakingly unearthed by him over the years, Sunday Morning in Bed Scully had become his favorite. They allowed themselves this dangerous treat once a month. A Saturday night sleepover followed by a lazy Sunday. They alternated apartments just to be on the safe side, though they both knew their attempt at subterfuge would be stupidly transparent to anyone who was really paying attention.
“Hand over the sports section, please. Woman.”
“That’s more like it.”
Mulder had his hand out for it and got it tossed in his face instead. “Hey, now, watch what you’re doing there, slugger!”
“I’ll slug you,” she chirped, folding the news section in two, half a smile turning up the corner of her mouth.
He laid the paper next to his hip and rolled over on his side, propping up on an elbow and giving her a slow once-over. She was sitting up slumped against a couple pillows, her hair a tousled mess and pulled back with a narrow black headband, glasses riding the end of her nose, her face free of make-up other than the tiny smudges of mascara she’d missed after their co-ed shower the night before. She was wearing a gray t-shirt she’d pilfered from the pile of clean laundry waiting in its basket to be put away. Her shapely little legs were stretched out on top of the bedspread, ten perfect toes sporting harlot-red nail polish. He watched her long enough for a flush to bloom on her cheek. Then he got a fraction of a head turn; it was mostly her eyes that shifted.
“Something I can do for you?”
“You sure are puurrdy, Agent Scully,” he drawled, doing his best Sheriff Hartwell impression. “Ah do declare.” He curled under his upper lip atop his front teeth just as she deigned to look him face on. That got him a smack on the arm.
“You are such a brat.” He leaned over and started walking two fingers up the leg closest to him, starting at her knee. “Knock it off and go check breakfast. I can smell it.”
“Those are not the rules,” he pointed out. “The guest is supposed to take care of breakfast, remember?”
“And I brought a casserole fully assembled. I even put sausage in it, just for you. All you have to do is take it out of the oven.”
“Real sausage, Scully?”
“Yes,” she said patiently, eyes on the paper. “Straight from a turkey.”
He grumbled low in his throat and did a three-quarter roll out of bed, loping in his boxers toward the kitchen. “Toast?” he asked over his shoulder. She looked up as he’d hoped, and he braced his hands against the bedroom doorway and shook his ass at her.
“Oh, that’s real classy, Mulder. No, no toast, thank you. And wash your hands!”
He was back in a few minutes, bearing a battered cookie sheet loaded with cereal bowls filled with their breakfast, spoons, paper towels, and two glasses of orange juice. They’d already run out of coffee, and he didn’t feel like making more. He made a production of serving her, laying a towel across her lap and handing her a bowl with a kiss to the crown of her head. Each nightstand got a glass of OJ. He sat down with his bowl and swung his legs up onto the bed, flipping his wrist and sending the cookie sheet flying onto the seat of the chair where clothes bound for the dry cleaner lived. It promptly slid off and landed on the floor.
“Shit,” he muttered.
They both went quiet as they spooned eggy casserole into hungry mouths and got busy catching up on the world outside their respective apartments and the basement office. “Trade?” he asked after a while. Scully handed him the news and he gave her sports. She promptly set it aside and dug for the arts section. Outside an ambulance screamed its way down the street. He was three paragraphs into an article about nanotechnology when she sketched a tiny gasp and drummed the back of her fingers against his thigh. “What?”
“The National Gallery of Art is opening an exhibit next month of some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. I’ll have to check that out.”
“O’Keeffe? Isn’t she the one who painted all the vulvas?”
She clucked like an angry hen. “They’re not vulvas, Mulder. Most of the pieces you’re thinking of are flowers.”
“Kind of the same thing, huh?”
“Perhaps the shapes are similar. But that happens all the time in nature; you know about repeating patterns. There are fractals, line patterns, waves, the Fibonacci sequence- “
“Tessellations, meanderings,” he finished for her as he set his empty bowl on the nightstand and left the bed to dig through the bookcase on the opposite wall. “Yeah, I know, but this is different. I read somewhere that O’Keeffe said there were images only women could understand and render effectively and that’s why some of her pieces look the way they do. Ah-ha, found it!” He dove for the bed and tilted the cover of the hefty book so she could see the title.
“Great American Artists,” she read. “You have an art book, Mulder?”
“I’m not completely uncivilized,” he grouched. “Actually, my mom gave it to me when I moved in here. She thought it would class up the joint to have it sitting on my coffee table.”
“And look where it ended up.”
He tossed her a frown and thumbed through the book.
“No, I like your apartment, Mulder, it’s warm and cozy.”
“Not too flea market for you?”
“No, not at all. Everything is very much you. Every object serves a purpose and tells a story. I like that. It’s a nice little peek inside your head.”
“Don’t go peeking too deep, Scully” he snickered. “Okay, here, look at this one.” His index finger rested on a painting of gentle curves and swoops in shades of gray, soft pink, and white, a defined maroon arch at its center, like the entrance to a grotto. She pushed his finger aside so she could read the title.
“Black Iris. 1929.”
“Tell me that’s not a vulva.” He examined the piece while she did, and then turned his gaze to study her instead. His lower brain kicked in and took over before he could put the brakes on and consider the idea brewing there. “Here, hold this,” he handed her the book. “I’ll prove it to you. No, no, keep it open on that page.” He came up on his knees and yanked her borrowed t-shirt up to her waist. “May I?”
“Mulder…”
He waited; a guileless face aimed her way. Watched as her features shifted from affectionate exasperation to something darker, more primal. She granted permission with an infinitesimal tilt of her head, and he quickly peeled her underwear down her legs and nudged them apart with his knees. He loved that she’d let him do things like this. She was as open and generous with her body as she was closed off and protective of her deeper emotions.
He tugged her down the bed a little, grabbed one of the pillows and placed it under her rump, arranged the book on the concave slope of her abdomen so she was holding the open page toward her. “With which to better illustrate,” he explained and caught the edge of a stifled giggle. “Now, you keep your eyes on that and I’ll walk you through my theory, do a comparison.”
He came out of his kneel and settled on his stomach. Brought both hands up and laid his fingers on either side of her vulva. “The colors don’t precisely correspond; I’ll grant you that. You’re pinker, more reds and corals.” He took in a lungful of air and the scent of her settled in his brain, flooding his body with oxytocin. His hips pulsed against the bed, his cock hardening. She was already growing plump too, her body readying itself for him. “Now here we have the labia majora,” he said as the pads of his fingers leisurely swept up and down the outer edges of her sex, through the springy curls of auburn. “And the perinium.” He dragged a thumb down from where she was oozing nectar to the edge of her anus and back up. She wriggled above him. “Are you seeing that, Scully?”
“Yes,” she sighed, her knees creeping up, feet settling flat on the bed.
“Good, I thought you might.” He turned and laid an open-mouthed kiss on her inner thigh. “The labia minora are next. See how they’re furled like petals, so soft and fragrant, so beautiful, like a hothouse flower.” He gently rubbed and pulled at them, easing her more fully open to his eyes and his touch. “The vagina,” he murmured as he slipped the edge of his thumb into her. “Right where that dark arch is in the painting, like a mysterious, beckoning cave of warmth. You see that?” He shifted and slid two fingers deep. She moaned and bucked her hips. Saliva flooded his mouth.
“And here,” his fingers left her heat and he smoothed his thumb up slowly, slowly, dragging her slippery sweetness with it. “The clitoris. The only organ in the human body designed solely for pleasure.” Scully gasped as he circled it lazily. ”Eight thousand nerve endings, right here in this hooded little bud. That’s twice as many as I have in my cock. Did you know that?”
He raised his eyes but couldn’t see her. She was hidden behind the book. “I’m gonna pretend I’m a honeybee now, Scully, and I’m just gonna dive right into this lush little flower and eat you up. Is that alright?”
The book went sailing off the side of the bed and onto the floor. “Okay, now you’ve gone and done it,” she growled as she wrenched up, hands reaching for his face to pull him closer. “Get to work, busy bee.”
He laughed and dove in.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Later, on the couch and mostly dressed. ESPN turned down low, an old basketball game in progress. He was skimming the comics while Scully tackled the crossword puzzle, stretched out with her head on his thigh. She was feeling confident, bouncing the clicker end of a Bic pen against her lower lip.
“Mulder?”
“Hmmm?”
“A nine-letter word for artifice.”
“You got first or last?”
“Last is an M. The fourth is an A.”
He shuffled through the files in his head, folded the comics and set them under his elbow on the arm of the couch. “Shit, Scully.”
“I know. I’m drawing a complete blank.”
“Come back to it later.”
“No, I’m too close to finishing. I need an answer.”
“Of course you do,” he said and looked down at her with enormous affection, his fingertips smoothing her wrinkled brow.
“You know, this is your fault,” she declared. She craned her neck and peered up at him.
“Care to elaborate on that accusation?”
“You told me once you were gonna fuck me stupid,” she smirked. “I think you finally succeeded.”
He snorted and reached his hand to her folded knee, ran it up her bare leg and under the hem of the running shorts she’d borrowed. The edge of his thumb skimmed the silky crease that joined thigh to torso, grazing the edge of her mons. “Want to see if I can fuck you back to smart?”
“Maybe later,” she teased, with that husky rasp she got sometimes, like she’d been sneaking cigarettes again.
“Well, you’re never gonna finish that crossword puzzle now. You had your chance.” She twisted and pulled herself further into his lap, her shoulder landing on his upper thigh, nosed up his t-shirt, without warning started nipping at his belly. He jerked and yelped as she dug her fingers into his ribs. “Stop it, Scully! You know I don’t like being tickled. Ouch, goddammit, knock it off!” And then her face landed squarely in his lap. His irritated laughter slowly died in his throat as she nosed at his crotch.
“What’re you doing?”
“What does it look like?” she mumbled against him. Her little fingers crept into the front of his boxers and fluttered along the length of his dick. That part of his anatomy knew exactly what she was doing and rose slowly to greet her. She pulled him free through the slit in his boxers and caressed him with cheeks and chin, rolling her face across him like a cat. Mulder sighed and slumped deeper into the couch, a hand coming to rest lightly on her head.
“Dana Katherine, I’d like an explanation,” he whispered, short on breath. She raised her eyes to him and squeezed him tight at the root. Fuck, but she was beautiful! He let her eyes pull him in and down, down, down into where she was nothing but heat and light and home.
“Patterns, Mulder,” she said and laid a kiss on the head of his cock. “Patterns and shapes repeated in nature, remember?” She tilted her head and ran her lips up the length of his shaft. “There are several examples of shapes that are decidedly phallic.” She switched sides as he gazed down at her, lust-drunk and full of tenderness. “There’s the geoduck.” He chuffed his disgust and watched as she slid off the couch and onto her knees between his outspread thighs, taking him back in hand, her features bisected by his girth, the tip of her nose rubbing against him. “The huacrapona palm, the iriartea deltoidea; also known as the penis or the cock tree. Did you know that, Mulder?”
“Uh-uh,” was all he was capable of because he knew he was a goner. And, sure enough, her wet pink tongue unfurled and ran slowly up the underside of his cock, fluttered at the notch of scar on the ridged crown; and then she enveloped him in her glorious, hot mouth. He held off his orgasm for as long as he could. Long enough that when he offered her a hand to lift her from her knees and into his lap, he had an answer.
“Stratagem,” he nuzzled against her hairline. “A nine-letter word for artifice. How’s Indian strike you for lunch?”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Late afternoon. She was in the kitchen dividing up the leftover lamb korma, palak paneer, and naan. Soon, he knew, she’d move to the bedroom and start collecting her things. Much as he cherished their illicit monthly slumber parties, he disliked this: the part where she got ready to leave. It didn’t matter that he’d see her the next morning. The hours after she’d left were long and generally sleepless.
He looked up from the travel section of the paper as she laid a Tupperware container on the dining room table and joined him in the living room. She was back in her Scully clothes: black denim and a lilac cardigan. She plopped down on the couch beside him, laid her hand on the plank of his thigh.
“I should probably get going.”
“Stay for a bit, Scully,” he dipped and kissed her temple. “It’s not even getting dark yet. Besides, I got a proposition for you.” He snapped the newspaper straight and folded it in half, leaned up and placed it on the coffee table.
“I’m listening.”
“I was just reading about cabin rentals and how more of them are becoming available year-round along the Appalachians. Let’s take a long weekend soon, fly down to Roanoke and find us a cabin tucked away in the forest.” He smiled as she donned her skeptical face.
“Mulder, our trips to the forest don’t generally pan out the way we imagined they would.”
“But with no X-file to investigate, Scully. Just, y’know, hanging out. Like this.”
“Again, should I list all the occasions we’ve had where we’ve traveled through flora and fauna and ended up ass-deep in tree monsters, or psychedelic mushroom bile, or bugs, or any other number of beasties and ghouls?”
“Beasties, huh?” He slid an arm around her shoulder, tugged her close. “You’re adorable.”
“Well, what would we even do, if we did… this thing?”
He looked long at her, just to make certain he was actually seeing something resembling serious consideration shifting her features. And it was there. Not serious, perhaps, but close enough.
“Sleep late. Maybe hike some trails,” he said. “Find a pond and catch our dinner. Make love on a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace. I don’t know. We’ll think of something.”
She softly parroted him, her lips hardly moving. “Make love on a bearskin rug.”
“Yeah. Don’t you remember?“
“Yes, of course I do. How could I forget?”
“I was a fucking mess that night, Scully. But you… you saved my ass. Again.”
She raised her eyes to his and he was taken aback by the tenderness he saw there, the quietly confident acknowledgement of her love for him. “Not so much a mess,” she murmured. “It was lovely; hushed, languid, like our first time all over again.”
He did the only thing he could think to do. He leaned in and kissed her. Softly, taking in her breath when her mouth opened under his. He took it slow, wanting to sink into it, to prolong it before it reached its inevitable end. She would have to leave soon. He was surprised when she didn’t pull away, when she deepened the kiss instead, and deftly maneuvered until she was straddling him. The couch creaked beneath them. One hand reached to grasp the curve of her ass, the other tunneling through her hair as she cupped his face in her talented doctor’s hands.
They finally broke apart, both breathy and pouting. She gave him Eskimo kisses and brushed her palms across his hedgehog hair. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Scully,” he sighed against her mouth, “but I don’t think we’ve had our fill just yet.”
She rested her brow upon his. “Make love with me, Mulder. Like the first time.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” he crooned, sliding them to the edge of the couch and standing, bracing her with an arm underneath her and turning for the bedroom, her legs wrapped tightly around his waist, her arms encircling his neck. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~