<![CDATA[
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 13:55:39 -0600 (CST)
TITLE: The Games We Play (1/3)
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle
SUMMARY: Scully takes a shower and Mulder interferes. Or: In which
two stubborn and passionate agents learn to compromise.
CLASSIFICATION: SRH. (Story, Romance, Humor)
KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully romance. UST.
RATING: R. Language and sexual situations. That seems to be how
I classify all of my stories, now that I think about it. Either that's
all I write or it all seems the same to me unless they're actually having
sex. Probably closer to a PG-13 in this case, but don't let that deter
you from reading the story. :) We all enjoy a good tease, right?
DISCLAIMER: Mulder and Scully belong to Chris Carter, Fox Television
and 1013 Productions. They're not mine, and I'm not making any profit
from this story.
SPOILERS: None. Cancer-free and timeless. (I hope.) I think it
would fit nicely after "Detour," but then, what fanfic wouldn't?
ARCHIVE: Anywhere, as long as my name and address remain attached.
When possible, please send me URLs of archived locations. Originally
posted February 14, 1998.
FEEDBACK: Compliments and constructive criticism are welcome.
Please send all comments to: shanak@nwu.edu
AUTHOR'S NOTE: So this is what happens when I try to write a long,
serious piece with an actual theme. The part of my brain that does the
writing becomes fixated on trivial mind candy scenes that just won't fit.
Send me feedback and I'll be motivated to write more of all kinds! Thanks
to Amanda and Dawson for beta reading. Happy Valentine's Day!
***
I. Mischief
She shouldn't have been surprised that the water was cold.
She was in a shitty shower in a shitty motel in some God-forsaken
town someplace in the Midwest. Ohio? No. That wasn't right.
It was one of those long days where the only clue as to her final
resting place was the area code on the 1970-circa phone bolted to the
nightstand. She strained her memory. 219. Where was 219?
Indiana, Scully remembered. Scott, from college, who had transferred
to Notre Dame. She'd spent a good portion of her monthly allowance on
phone bills heavily marked with the 219 area code. And Mulder thought he
was the only one with a good memory and a proclivity for phone sex.
Didn't they make warm water in Indiana? Somehow her hair didn't seem
to get as wet when she washed it in this sub-zero sludge. Probably pumped
right out of Lake Michigan, she thought. And then immediately rescinded
her critical comments as the spray doubled in intensity and approached
hot-spring temperatures.
She eased to the edge of the tiny stall to avoid getting scorched and
snaked her leg around to the faucet. Damn those tiny feet. She could
almost turn the cold water on without leaning down if they were just an
inch longer. Scully thought her best Indiana-loving thoughts and squeezed
her eyes shut in frustration. What a shitty day.
After five minutes or so, the hyperactive heater tamed down enough
for her to slip back under what in another day had been a "MassagePlus!
Magic Showerhead."
Someone was pounding on the door. And saying her name, she thought,
if she heard correctly over the wheeze of the radiator.
"Mulder?" she called. The pounding and far-away sounding voice
continued. "Mulder," she said louder. "I can't hear what you're saying."
A sudden gust of wintry air rushed into the bathroom. Great. The
heat in the shitty room didn't work any better than the shitty shower.
"Scully?" Mulder's voice was low and oddly intimate. Scully
suddenly realized that she felt naked.
She *was* naked, of course. She was in the shower, so it made sense
for her to be naked. But somehow she hadn't been quite so aware of it
before.
"Mulder, can you shut the door?"
"What kind of take-out?"
"What?" Scully sighed. She was cold. She hoped he had just nodded
absentmindedly at her request and wasn't deliberately ignoring her.
"It looks like our choices are..." He paused, and Scully imagined
him standing in the doorway, holding a local phone book. "Pizza.
Chinese. Burgers. More pizza. Umm... I think that's it."
"I don't care." She really wished he would shut the door.
"Scully..." Mulder could really whine when he wanted to. This was
how things worked, on these long cases that brought them out to Ohio --
no, Indiana -- and left them saddled with half-staffed police departments
for weeks on old cases no one was interested in.
They had a dialogue established, a script of sorts. Saying she
didn't care was saying she didn't want to play, saying she didn't have the
energy for the back-and-forth verbal parry Mulder craved on and off the
job.
"Chinese," she said. She was playing, sort of, but she wasn't trying
to win.
"Your regular?" he asked. It was an easy pitch. She could challenge
that he really knew what her regular was; he could prove that he indeed
did. They could eventually order bad chicken Chow Mein and weak hot and
sour soup for her, Kung Pao chicken and eggrolls for him, and call it a
night.
Cold air made Scully feel obstinate, similar to cold water. "Yeah,"
she said simply. "Can you shut the door now?"
He shut the door, the push just shy of enough pressure to make it
qualify as a slam. Scully was struck by the thought that she couldn't
remember the last time she'd taken a shower with someone else. She tipped
her face back into the water as she rinsed out the shampoo, letting the
spray run over her eyes and nose to wash away a thought that would only
lead to more depressing ones.
The door opened again.
"Scully?"
"Mulder, can you please shut the damn door?" This time he readily
complied, and after a moment of silence Scully realized he was still in
the bathroom.
"I have an idea," he said.
Oh no. Scully paused as she worked the conditioner through her hair.
An idea. At 10 o'clock on the first night of a case. Please don't let
this involve gravedigging, she thought.
"Let's go out."
He wanted to go out? Like go steady?
"I just called and the Chinese place is open until midnight."
They had left D.C. at 8 a.m., spent three hours on a plane, two hours
in a car, and nine hours digging through all the old case paperwork at the
station. Scully wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed and be
unconscious till their encore performance the next day. She wasn't in the
mood for playing a game; she was tired. "What's wrong with ordering in?"
"I'm just sick of eating food out of boxes in shitty motels," he
said. At least he wasn't trying to pass this dump off as another of his
great discount finds.
To be fair, she thought, the bed in her room was probably just as
shitty as the rest of their accommodations, so it would hardly be the
refuge for which she ached. "Mulder, that means I'm going to have to get
dressed again."
"Does that mean if we eat in you'll stay naked?" he asked. Too easy,
she knew. She had given him that homerun. "Come on, Scully, it won't
take that much longer to get ready."
She heard him unzip something, then a flux in pressure indicated
he'd turned the sink on for a quick moment. It was hard to tell over the
rush of water, but she could almost swear she'd just heard the slick sound
of clothing coming off of skin.
"Mulder, what are you doing?"
"Shaving. To save time."
"Don't you have a bathroom?"
He ignored that. "We could save some water if we showered together,
too, you know. It's something like 15 gallons a day. I read that if half
the unmarried people in this country showered together twice a week it
would save enough water to fill all the Great Lakes every month."
"I didn't realize Playboy had articles about the environment."
"You should see the spread they did on female forest rangers," he
shot back. Scully tried to tally their innuendoes for the evening as
Mulder fell quiet momentarily. "Look," he continued, "it would just be
nice if for once we could go *out.* We're done with our paperwork,
paroled until our meeting at 10. We're going to be stuck in this town for
another week or two at best."
"It's not my fault you don't have a social life, Mulder." She
stopped at that. It wasn't, right? But, if pressed, she might hazard
that Mulder was to blame for her having had only two dates in five years.
"Anyway," she continued, "we *do* go out. I don't remember anyone forcing
you to come over for pizza and a movie last week."
"That's different," he said, and the whine was back. "Don't you want
to get dressed up and have an evening among non-criminals?"
Scully was warmed up by now, and tired of watching from the
sidelines. "Like a date?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said without thinking. Scully scoffed. It had been easy
to win that round. "No," he quickly amended. "Just dinner."
"That's what they always say," she said, only softer this time, under
her breath.
"There's even karaoke."
"Mulder, no matter what you do, I'm not going to sing Elvis songs
again." At this point, there was no reason to even keep score. They'd
just keep going around and around until what was left of the warm water
ran out and she retreated. She got the feeling it would be distinctly
difficult to march her way out of this situation with any dignity intact.
"We'll sit at the other end of the restaurant, I promise," he said.
Scully wrenched the faucet off with a sharp turn. "No karaoke," she
said firmly, and then wrinkled her nose at the teacherish sound of her
voice. She sounded like she had her hands on her hips. She *did* have
her hands on her hips, for God's sake.
She reached her arm around the edge of the shower curtain, laying her
palm face up. After a long moment, she felt Mulder's fingers slide
between her own.
"Isn't dancing usually reserved for *after* dinner, Scully?"
"Mulder." Her voice was exasperated even though she did not remove
her hand. "Towel." He let go to grab the thin, shabby fabric from the
hook above the toilet and she drew it back through the narrow gap she'd
created between the curtain and the tile.
The shitty towel was a bastard step-child to the bathmat. Scully
frowned as the edge fell just below the curve of her ass, leaving all of
her legs exposed. She pushed the curtain back in one swift motion, like
she was reminding herself on a late night in a lonely apartment that there
were no monsters hiding in the tub. One thing she'd learned since
beginning on the X-files was that monsters came in many forms.
Mulder stood not a foot away, shirtless and clean-shaven. The mirror
and his skin glistened with a steamy shimmer and the stray rolling drop of
condensed dew. Scully was glad she had an excuse for being wet. He
rested his butt on the little ledge of a sink and she squeezed into the
square inch of space his concession rewarded her for an exit aisle.
Her back touched the cool tile of the bathroom wall as she turned for
a moment to face him. She became mesmerized by a river borne of sweat or
rinsewater that wound its way from his right ear across to the left side
of his collarbone. Mulder didn't speak, just watched her watch him for a
weighty lifetime of 10 seconds.
Scully blinked her eyes once and refocused on the middle of his
forehead, a considerably safer location for her attentive stare. "Your
turn," she said. Her subdued voice still echoed in the tiny cavern, and
she opened the door to stop the reverberations.
Mulder grasped the door handle lightly and followed her with his eyes
as she left. He closed the door slowly, slipping his head around at the
last moment. "Which game are we playing again?"
[end 1/3. please send all feedback to: shanak@nwu.edu]
TITLE: The Games We Play (2/3)
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle
DISCLAIMER: And other goodies in part one. Send all feedback to:
shanak@nwu.edu
II. Tomfoolery
For a bumble-fuck town like this, Asia Palace wasn't half bad.
Mulder held the door open for Scully and she slipped by, just under his
nose, smelling for all the world like those little cakes of sweetened
hotel soap.
Or maybe that was him. He'd had to use the complimentary bar to wash
everything, including his hair, after he'd realized that the rest of his
shower stuff was in his bathroom. Scully had some sort of shampoo in a
pinkish bottle, but he didn't want to use it. He had this fuzzy scenario
half-imagined where she would smell her smell on him and laugh her ass
off. Better to stick with not-quite-Ivory.
"Now, you have to order something different," Mulder said with all
the enthusiasm of a YMCA summer counselor as they were seated by the
window at the front of the restaurant.
"Why?" She was practicing her petulant voice, he could tell.
"Because we're not going to come all the way out here and get Chow
Mein and hot and sour soup."
"All the way out where? Mulder, we got in the car and drove three
miles down the highway. Which, I must mention, we can see perfectly from
this table."
"Are you going to whine all the way through dinner?" he asked curtly.
He couldn't get the image of Scully and her feeble attempt to make that
bath-mat of a towel cover all the important parts of her body out of his
mind. Thank God for photographic memories.
The server was waiting expectantly at the table. Scully abandoned
her sulking long enough to order for both of them, a bunch of dishes he'd
never tried. All of them had little red stars next to their names. She
was trying to get even with a man who could drink Tabasco and not blink an
eye. This would be fun.
An intense explosion of angry words erupted behind Scully. They both
reached for their guns out of habit. There was a Chinese couple seated in
the booth next to them, arguing loudly but appearing to be relatively
non-violent.
"I promised no criminals, remember?" said Mulder, as if he alone had
quelled the situation.
"You don't speak Chinese, do you?" Scully asked. She'd love to know
what that last comment by the woman had been. The pitch and tone of the
remark hinted it was probably something she could toss off to Mulder the
next time he ditched her.
"No."
Scully paused. "Mulder, how is it that you got through Oxford, the
academy and years on this job and came out speaking *only* French? Which,
I might add, has never come in handy for us. Have you noticed that?"
"I've been working on my Klingon, but I wasn't sure how to slip it
in."
Scully chortled. "I bet."
Their food arrived, surprisingly filling and tasty. The absence of
bendable forks and chintzy balsawood chopsticks that left miniature
slivers along the fingers should have been a clue. There were even cloth
napkins. Wouldn't be a bad place to take a date, Mulder mused, and then
laughed at himself. Wasn't that what he had effectively done, despite his
earlier denial?
"Mulder, why *isn't* this a date?" Scully asked suddenly, her
chopsticks poised halfway to her lips.
For a woman who didn't believe in psychic ability she had amazing
timing. Mulder fumbled for his glass of ice water. Those little spicy
red peppers would be infinitely easier to handle than this line of
questioning. "Well..." He grasped for a bad spaghetti Western accent.
"Because there are laws about that sort of thing, pardner," he said.
If this was another game he'd never read the instruction book. He got the
feeling it was one of those cold-war logic deals where they only told you
the guidelines *after* you'd fucked up and gotten killed.
"Laws?" Scully drawled. Her easy adaptation to a realistic twang
made Mulder question the authenticity of her lispy intellectual
enunciation. Scully *did* have a dramatic side, after all.
"Okay," he said lamely, back in his Mulder-voice. "Maybe not laws.
Rules. Remember those?" The last part of his comment was gentle,
non-committal. He wasn't sure what move would disqualify him.
"You're the one who wrote the book on breaking them, if I recall
correctly." The lisp was back but Mulder decided he didn't care if it
*was* a put-on. It was just sexy.
"Taking your little notes again, Scully?"
"In fact," she said, ignoring his remark, "I think that's why they
sent me to spy on you in the first place." Scully carefully pushed a red
pepper to the edge of her plate. "And Mulder, you're changing the
subject. Why is the concept of going on a date with me so horrible?"
Horribly tempting, maybe. Mulder looked at her carefully. She was
smiling. Almost enough to see her teeth, he realized with no small amount
of shock. Jesus, she was *teasing* him, getting back at him for barging
in on her little sudsfest.
"Why isn't this a date?" she prodded.
Because he desperately believed in the rewards of delayed
gratification, Mulder thought. Because even though he now knew she just
playing, he wanted to be sure she knew where he stood.
"Because it *is* your fault I don't have a social life, Scully," he
said.
"What?"
"I haven't gone on a date in... No, I don't even want to count how
long it's been. I'm with you for something like 16 hours a day, even when
we're not out of town."
"That's not my fault. You can't blame me for being married to your
work."
"Sure I can." Her incredulous look was too much fun to spoil yet.
"Scully, before you joined the X-files, I had a life. I went home at the
end of the day, put in a few extra hours toward the quest here and there,
but it wasn't all-consuming. With you there, I had to be better than
that. I had to prove it was worth their allocation. I had to prove *you*
were worth their allocation, because once we started working together..."
Mulder's voice trailed off. How the hell had this become his little
confessional and not just a joke? He took a deep breath. She'd just
interrogate the rest of that sentence out of him if he didn't give it up
willingly now. "Once we started working together," he began again, "I
thought I had a real shot at the truth. And I knew the only way I might
find the answers I was looking for was with your help."
Scully was silent. She probably thought he was still just playing
around, and he tried on his best serious-face to convince her of his
sincerity. Finally, she just nodded. She seemed to accept what he had
said. He thought that look in her eyes might betray that she was secretly
pleased at his compliment. He grinned widely then, pleased with himself
for being open with Scully.
"And besides, Scully, nothing got really strange until you showed
up," he said more lightly. "You know... I never realized that connection
before."
"Oh, no. Don't do that," Scully said. "Don't you even blame this
B-grade science fiction movie of a job we have on *my* addition to the
X-files."
Mulder glanced around for the server, looking for a little help.
There was no one in the dining area at all and, with no warning, bright
fuschia lights snapped on, soaking the room with a Barney-colored
atmosphere. The opening notes of "Heartbreak Hotel" blared from the
karaoke bar. They *had* sat on the other side of the restaurant, but a
Chinese restaurant in the middle of rural Ohio -- no, Indiana -- could
only be so big.
He could feel Scully looking at him, trying to calculate if he'd been
out of her reach long enough to plan some little surprise like this
without her noticing. He was innocent but somehow that made it harder to
look like it. Fuck it. If she was going to think the worst, it wouldn't
make a difference what she said.
"Not quite as good as 'Viva Las Vegas,' but a classic all the same,"
Mulder said, shouting a bit over the whine of a painfully skinny dishwater
blonde who'd seized the microphone out of her friend's hand. Scully
looked... Well, she looked pissed, to put it mildly. Fine, then. It was
his turn to tease.
He slouched back in the booth, spreading his arms out across the top
of the cushion behind him. "I just looooove Elvis," he said, smiling
widely. "And, now that I think about it, so do you, Scully. It must be
fate." His sing-song intonation had definitely done the trick. Now
Scully was the one searching for someone to bring their check. Good
manners were the only reason she didn't just toss a twenty on the table
and head for the parking lot.
"What was your favorite again?" he continued, ignoring her obvious
discomfort. She was silent. "'Jailhouse Rock?'" Her mouth twitched
slightly. He couldn't tell if it would develop into a grin or a predatory
baring of teeth before she swooped in for the kill. He decided to push
his luck.
"Oh, *I* know," he said, with all the mocking of a 14-year-old bully.
"It was 'Love Me Tender.'" He leered a little more lasciviously than
normal and was rewarded by Scully rolling her eyes. At least she wasn't
monumentally pissed. "Of course, considering you'd already put away a few
by the time you started singing, I'm not surprised you can't remember."
"How could I forget?" Scully asked. "Not that you would let me. It
was just about the most..." She stopped mid-sentence.
"Most what?" he probed. "Wonderful?" he suggested. "Memorable?
Amazing?" Scully shook her head, suppressing a grin. He would do just
about anything to keep her smiling. Mulder went for broke: "Erotic?"
That earned a full-throated laugh. God, when was the last time he'd
heard her sound like that? Too long ago, if the last time he could
remember was her sputtering chuckle over a dug-up grave in Oregon. And
that time, of course, she'd been laughing at him. He'd like to think she
was laughing with him now. It was hard to tell with the pink glow from
the lights, but it looked as if she were blushing a bit.
Scully ran her hands through her hair, composing herself, and leaned
back. "I was going to say 'humiliating,' Mulder. But now that you
mention it... It was the most wonderful, memorable, amazing, erotic,
humiliating moment of my life." She lifted an eyebrow to indicate she was
waiting for a reaction.
And then, blessedly, the hostess appeared with the check set on a
tray beneath two fortune cookies, saving his ass from trying to respond in
any coherent fashion to what was most likely merely a joke.
[end 2/3. please send all feedback to: shanak@nwu.edu]
TITLE: The Games We Play (3/3)
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle
DISCLAIMER: And other goodies in part one. Send all feedback to:
shanak@nwu.edu
III. Diversions
"Let me guess," Scully said. "You believe in fortune cookies."
"What do you mean, 'believe in fortune cookies'? Like in their
existence? Sure, I believe fortune cookies exist. You might even say
they're ritualistic, considering they're a staple of most Chinese
restaurants' fare." Mulder plucked the nearest cookie and began to crack
it open. "Don't you?"
"Believe that a mass-produced slip of paper in a dessert can predict
my future?"
"Stranger things have happened, Scully."
"Stranger things have happened because you're around, Mulder. And,
no, I don't believe. But I suppose you're going to make me follow some
strange method of opening and sharing mine just to ensure that the skeptic
will be proven wrong. Right?"
"Well," Mulder said seriously, "you know you have to eat the whole
cookie before looking at the fortune."
"I thought that eating the cookie meant you accepted the fate it
predicted," Scully replied.
"Which do you think?" he asked, with a sly grin.
"Neither. Nice try, though." She broke the cookie in half and
popped one of the parts in her mouth, crunching loudly. Mulder did the
same.
"Compromise?" he suggested, crumbs falling from his full lips.
"We'll read them now." Scully shrugged. It didn't make a difference to
her, and she was growing tired of the cat-and-mouse games with her
partner. She did love to watch him eat, though. Other agents might have
found his sunflower seed habit disgusting or at least annoying, but she
would sometimes secretly replenish his supply to ensure he never ran out.
She reached for the little slip. The small, pinkish print read:
Happiness is within your grasp. In bed, she added mentally out of habit,
a vague memory of being surrounded by take-out boxes and a half-dozen
friends on the University of Maryland quad skirting through her thoughts.
Dessert had been a cookie with the same declaration, or something
generically similar.
She'd turned and read it to... What was his name? Ryan, maybe, or
Danny. Whichever. He was another dark-eyed Irish boy who'd eventually
helped her realize that predictions like this were bullshit, in or out of
bed.
Mulder was looking at her expectantly. "Let me guess," he said.
"Yours has something to do with a fat, white Nazi stormtrooper." She
shook her head and read the fortune in a flat, dry tone, waiting for the
inevitable innuendo. He said nothing, wouldn't even meet her eye.
He had always associated the word grasp with hands -- grasping hands
was a fairly common turn of phrase, he reasoned -- and he found himself
staring at Scully's hands as they rested a few inches away from his on the
table. Her fingers were slim but looked strong; her nails were neatly
rounded but trimmed to a practical length.
He wanted very badly to hold them. Not for the quick squeeze they
shared before a tough mission or a gentle reassurance after a harrowing
case, but something longer. An exploration, tracing her life-line and
testing the way his larger hands would fit between her own. Gauging the
weight of them as they rested on his stomach or caressed his shoulders.
That would be damn near his definition of happiness.
"Problem?" she queried, her brow half-raised with a gentle prodding.
Mulder was suddenly, quizzically intense. She'd never known anyone to
slide from playful joking to focused introspection so quickly. Finally he
brought his face up to meet her gaze.
He mutely shook his head -- more to clear his thoughts than answer
her question -- and unfolded his fortune, reading it aloud as he scanned
the words: "Try a different approach to an old problem." Jesus, even the
damn waiter was psychic. How was it that he was the only one around not
to acquire a talent for mind-reading?
He watched Scully wrap her mind around the sentence, trying to play
the game and seek a deeper meaning in his fortune. She tugged lightly on
her bottom lip with her teeth as she thought, plucking the paper from his
hands in order to read it again. "Oh, Mulder," she said with a laugh,
"you missed the fine print."
"The what?" he said.
"Right here," she said, holding the slip just beyond where he could
see without glasses. "Look. It says: 'Buying your partner dinner will
redeem past transgressions.' That must be the bonus fortune or something."
He feigned grabbing for the fortune and she snatched his hand to
block him. Her nails were tiny half-moons of pressure on his skin; her
fingers warm and soft beside his.
"Does that mean that *you're* my problem, Scully?" he asked in a low
voice. She let their hands fall to the table without releasing him.
"I wasn't aware you had an 'approach' for dealing with me," she
replied in a deliberately measured tone. She turned up the edges of her
mouth in amusement and tilted her head, slowly looking him up and down,
appraising him. "If you do, I'm not sure there's any problem with it."
Maybe he'd just been fooling himself, Mulder thought. Fuck delayed
gratification. He wanted her, now, possibly right here on the goddamned
table. Would that qualify as a different approach? "What about that fine
print, those past transgressions I'm supposed to be redeeming?"
"I guess I can forgive them," Scully said. She looked down and was
surprised to see her hand still grasping his -- it had felt so natural
she'd stopped being shocked by the magnetism she felt between their
entwined fingers.
"So it's okay that I dragged you out of that shitty motel for a night
on the town?"
"Mulder, if this is your idea of a 'night on the town,' no wonder you
never have any dates." Scully's smile was rich with fondness and her
cheeks warmed slightly as she stared at him across the table.
"Does that make this a date, then?" Mulder mentally clapped a hand
over his mouth. He wasn't sure he wanted Scully to answer that question.
She was so good at drawing him into the banter -- he could start the
teasing but the path it took always seemed to wind up in her control.
She'd just looked so... happy, he guessed, just then. Like she really
*wanted* to be there and hadn't just given in to his whining.
Scully was quiet. Too quiet, she thought, gauging the look of equal
parts terror and hope on Mulder's face. She just didn't want to say it
wrong. She knew there'd be other chances to tell Mulder how she felt, how
she wanted to feel, but there would only be one opportunity to get the
first words right.
She was too quiet, Mulder thought. She's trying not to hurt my
feelings by openly rejecting me. He tried to discern what the pain deep
beneath his breastbone meant. He wasn't too surprised Scully abided by
the Thumper Rule: if she couldn't say anything nice, she wouldn't say
anything at all. He should just take it back and save her the
embarrassment. As much as he leered and joked, he didn't really want to
make her uncomfortable.
"I know, there are rules," said Mulder just as Scully said, "I want
it to be."
Scully pulled her hand from his in surprise. "Do you care about
them?" she asked, overlapping as he questioned: "You do?" They both
half-smiled; between them they were fully happy, Scully mused. She nodded
at him to go first.
"No," he said quickly. "You do?" he asked again.
"I don't know," she said. His face fell. "I mean, yes, I want this
to be a date. But I don't know if it should be, or how we would..." She
paused. "Make this work, I guess. Whatever this is. It isn't quite the
same as not turning in a report on time, you know."
"Yeah, but I've done a lot worse than that and they haven't fired me
yet," Mulder said.
She chewed on her lip as she thought, and Mulder reached out and
grasped her hand again. "We both have a lot to lose, Mulder." She
thought about all the unanswered questions about her disappearance, and
her sister, and Mulder's sister, and his father --
"I don't know how I'll be able to live without those lonely Saturday
nights," he cracked. She didn't smile at all this time. The pain in his
chest surrounded his lungs. It was like drawing breath from under a stack
of iron-filled chest x-ray vests. Was that how Scully had felt, burdened
by too many pounds just as weight shed itself from her slender frame? He
wasn't done looking for the men who had done that to her, he realized,
with a rush of anger that surprised him.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't mean that." She squeezed his
hand gently.
"Compromise?" she asked, waiting for him to lift his eyes to meet her
own. He asked what she meant without speaking, his brow scrunching in a
question. "You have to try something new, remember?" He nodded.
"Tonight -- this can be a date."
"That doesn't sound like I have to compromise much, Scully. Did you
skip a team-building exercise?"
Scully chuckled softly. "That's only half the compromise, Mulder.
This can be a date, but we don't go on another one unless we've made up
our mind about the other stuff."
Mulder knew what other stuff she meant. Not sex -- that wasn't what
she was talking about. What kind of a commitment they wanted to make,
though, and how that would change their work or their working together.
Talk about delayed gratification.
"Okay," he said, "on two conditions. You can compromise, too,
right?" Damn, she'd walked into that one, Scully thought. She nodded
assent.
Mulder took a breath and pushed out the next sentence in a whoosh of
air: "If this is a date then we get to kiss, at least once." She was
quiet again, for a moment.
In a whir of movement, Scully pulled Mulder's collar with her free
hand and brought him closer, until their foreheads were almost touching
across the table. Before he could speak, she kissed him on the lips.
After a second of shock, he closed his eyes and returned the gesture. She
broke the kiss gently and sat back.
The hurt in his chest was absent, replaced by a thudding heartbeat
and flushed cheeks. "What's number two?" Scully asked smoothly, as if
nothing had happened. Damn, she knew how to play. He waited until his
mind could form a coherent sentence and then stood up, taking her hand and
pulling her out of the booth. He could still win this game.
Mulder dropped two twenties on the table and turned to face her. He
leaned down quickly and caught her mouth again, holding her face tenderly
in his palms. As he pulled away, Scully exhaled lightly and he could
taste the sweet vanilla of the fortune cookie on his tongue.
Her eyes were heavy and her pulse beat rapidly. How could there be
rules against something like this, Scully wondered fuzzily as Mulder led
her to the other end of the restaurant.
"No date is complete without Elvis songs," he said.
[end 3/3. please send all feedback to: shanak@nwu.edu]
.....................................................................
"Scully loves Mulder, and Mulder loves Scully.
It's a wonderful romance."
-- Chris Carter, "Inside the X-Files."
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