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It was bad enough being stuffed in a vent and having his face stolen. But that was typical day-at-the-office stuff. Seeing the thief try to make out with Scully using his face, well that was another story. It had been a month since it happened and Mulder still hadn’t shaken the image of it – Eddie van Blundht in his clothes, poised with his face inches from his Scully, about to do things to her that he himself had never dreamed he might get to do. Well, guess what. Now he was dreaming about it. All the goddamn time.
After the local PD had come to pick Eddie up, Mulder was unsure whether to stay or go. He felt betrayed by her, but also protective. After all, she had in a way been assaulted, in a way by him.
“Looked like he was about to try to kiss you.”
“Yeah-uh, I think so.”
“Good thing I got here when I did.”
“Yes, good thing.”
He hovered in the limbo between going and staying for an hour, getting no indication as to which Scully preferred. He watched and scratched his face nervously as she bashfully flitted around the apartment – cleaning up wine glasses, putting her hair up, taking it back down, getting him a glass of water, taking it back to put ice in it. Finally, just when he was about to leave, she suggested they watch a movie.
They sat on opposite sides of the couch, the cushions between them as insurmountable as an alligator-filled moat. Mulder’s mind ran on a loop as the movie played before his eyes. What did Scully show Eddie, what did he see in her that I never get to see? He pictured her sitting there, cast in the glow of the fireplace, flirting, batting her eyelashes. Come here, Mulder. Scully, a siren, beckoning him. It must have been something.
He’d imagined some version of the scenario every night since then, and every morning woke up hating Eddie a little more. So it was with great gloating satisfaction that he agreed to grant Eddie’s request for a visit. Yes, it would be a waste of time, but there was no asshole he would rather waste time on. He wasn’t sure if he would tell him off, or simply allow Eddie to see him sitting there in his own skin, on the right side of the glass next to Scully.
*
“I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” she said.
“He asked.”
“We have five witnesses to get to, and at least three hours of driving in between.”
“I would’ve thought you’d be happy. You guys were practically going steady.”
She sighed heavily.
“Don’t worry, Scully. I’ll make sure to give you two a moment alone together. Hell, maybe we could arrange for a conjugal visit.”
“You know, Mulder, I find your glibness on this topic somewhat galling. May I remind you he’s a criminal and I was one of his potential victims?”
“You didn’t exactly look unwilling.”
Scully slid her hands to the sides of her face like bookends as she tried to cool both her temper and the tide of heat rising in her cheeks. Letting Mulder see either could only make this situation stupider than it already was, and that was pretty stupid.
But the fact of the matter was no, she had not been unwilling.
The evening had been running on repeat in her mind for a month. Sure, it was her tendency to perseverate on the facts, to retrace her steps, to wonder if anything could have been done differently. But in this case, it wasn’t what she could have done differently, but rather, what she would have done… period.
Worse than the frequency of her mind wandering was the timing, the colliding of her thoughts with certain real life events. Whenever Mulder cuffed his sleeves and revealed his forearms, she thought of his arms that night. The way one of them had braced itself along the top of the sofa as the other stood like a column between her legs. The way she had slightly slid forward onto her tailbone toward it.
And when she looked up from a file, found Mulder watching and waiting patiently for her dissent, she thought of his gentle, curious gaze that night. The way it had practically peeled her like an orange as he asked her simple questions about her life.
She made a point of redirecting her thoughts late at night when she reached her hand between her legs and touched herself. But inevitably, every time, when she came, she would catch herself pitifully surrendering to the same image - Mulder in a grey t-shirt, leaning over her on the couch. In the morning she’d struggle to shake the memory even as he petulantly drank his morning coffee across from her. That’s it, she thought, masturbation is banned until further notice.
*
“Yeah, but I’m not Eddie van Blundht either. Am I?” he asked.
She pursed her lips and cocked her chin. He almost let her off the hook. But his ego was too raw and it nagged him to share the burden.
“Well… am I, Scully?”
“Mulder, I don’t know what you want me to say here. Am I supposed to be comparing you to Eddie van Blundht?” she droned in an annoyed monotone as they clicked down the hallway of the prison.
Eddie was right, in a way. Had Mulder stayed trapped in the vent, the guy probably would have gone on living Mulder’s life to the fullest. He tortured himself with the tableau of Eddie checking things off his list. The books he had on his shelves that he never got to, the recipes he never mastered, the languages he never learned, the old friends that he’d lost touch with. He pictured him quitting the FBI and writing the great American novel, flying Scully off to Monaco and turning into James fucking Bond.
He swung the building’s doors open and marched toward the car.
“You tell me. You’re the one who was ready to kiss him,” he snapped at her.
“I thought he was you, Mulder. That should be flattering. And I was drunk.”
“It’s either flattering, or it’s only because you were drunk, it can’t be both.”
She groaned in frustration. He looked at her in juvenile triumph – he was winning his argument against himself.
“It’s been four years of me as me, Scully. He had one day to get you into bed.”
Her eyebrows shot to the sky. “First of all-“ she said, her voice shrill, the lines above her nose appearing.
“Oh, sorry, right, it was a couch.”
“Have you been trying to get me into bed? Because if so, then yeah, you might want to take a couple pointers from the guy. From anyone, probably.”
This stopped Mulder in his tracks, and he turned to face her. Did he want her to want him to want her? Or was she just saying this for the sake of argument?
“Not with me, I mean, with whomever you might be trying to do that to. Pick up a bottle of wine, put some cologne on, ask them questions about their lives, their thoughts. Act like there are things in this world besides Saskwatches and aliens and bogey men and cosmically evil planetary conjunctions and computers that control your brain and-and-and-oh! Killer fucking cockroaches!”
“I ask you your thoughts every day!” He continued shuffling angrily toward the car.
“Only as a bureaucratic step in the process of proving yourself right.”
“I was right in this case, and if you had been willing to trust me for half the second that you trusted Eddie, you might not have found yourself curled up on the couch with him so easily.”
“You have no idea how easily or not easily that came about, you weren’t there.”
“He was wearing cologne?” Mulder marveled. “I have cologne?”
“Mulder, I refuse to get in that car until you stop acting like an idiot.”
Mulder turned. She was standing a few feet behind him, her black trench coat blowing in the breeze, eyes matching the sky so closely it seemed they’d been plucked from it. Everything about her stood in pornographic contrast to the suffocating greys of the prison grounds. Mulder mourned the passing of his indignation as she gulped and stood her ground, her beauty now governing all. Minutes, seeming like hours, seemed to pass as they stood at looked at each other.
“Did it ever occur to you that I trusted that he was you because I thought he was you?” she said, the sweetness in her voice gently filing away the edge. They had both silently surrendered their anger to the earth between them, like twigs into a bonfire.
“If you trusted me, you would’ve trusted me as me before you trusted him as me.”
“I don’t even know what we’re saying anymore,” she said in the slightly pitched voice of someone who’d received the wrong pizza delivery.
Self-pity began to fill the void where Mulder’s anger had been. Eddie van Blundht had known things about Mulder he didn’t know himself. Arguing with her was only making that fact plainer to see. He moved towards her, not wanting to say what he was about to say loudly. Afraid the volume of it might make it truer.
“I’m not mad at you, Scully. I’m not even mad at him. I’m mad because that guy is better at being me than I am, and he can barely tie his shoes,” he said. He swung his arm forward slightly so his fingers brushed hers, tickled them. “And you know I don’t like to lose,” he added for good measure, for the sake of coming to work tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Her fingers twisted through his like twine, but did not grasp them. He turned and bleeped the car to unlock, sensing the argument was over though no real resolution had been reached.
But as he opened the car door, she grabbed the sleeve of his coat and tugged him toward her, reeling him in ardently - the edge of his coat, his neck, his lips. All at once, Mulder realized Eddie hadn’t called him down here to bust his chops, he had called to finally make a contribution to the world. It was a PSA from one loser to another. She wasn’t trying to kiss me, Eddie was telling him, she was trying to kiss you.
Mulder slid his right hand over her face, framing her ear between the V of his pointer and middle fingers, the whole of her skull cradled in his palm. He raised his left hand to her waist. He could feel the heat of her body radiating through her blazer. He nudged her a little, really only meaning to test his hypothesis that he was holding Scully in his arms. She took it as an invitation and pressed herself closer to him, parting her lips and stroking his tongue with her own.
Well, okay then.
He leaned back on the car, door clunking behind him, allowing his face to be level with hers. She relieved her tiptoes and thanked him by running her teeth along his bottom lip. One side of her mouth lifted from the kiss into a wayward smile and he realized she had made contact with his ever-growing hard-on. He grieved as he anticipated her putting an end to it.
But instead, the kiss deepened, made itself at home, their tongues alternatingly lazy and fat, or pointy and searching. Encouraged, he waved his hands over the surface of her body like wands, testing reception as he dotted along her ribs, her neck, her ass. When she ruffled and gripped his hair, he sent strong feelings of resentment into the universe toward whoever put so many buttons on that beige blazer.
Scully started to make tiny involuntary sounds into his mouth, and he thought, I can’t believe this, Scully is going to fuck me in a maximum security prison parking lot. She pressed herself against his thigh and his dick barked at her for attention, only to be aggravated further as she ironed out the remaining space between their bodies.
But then she pulled her tongue away, rested her soft, swollen lips against his a moment and opened her eyes. She searched his face for something, looking neither remorseful nor blissful. He wished to God he knew what she was looking for because he would trade anything for a chance to take her into the back seat of the car. She ripped herself from him like a Bandaid, and walked with a chilling calm around the back of the car, making an O with her mouth and cleaning the edges of her lipstick with the side of a finger. He was speechless, terrified, and excruciatingly turned on.
She opened the car door. “Now you’re ahead of Eddie van Blundht,” she said as if she had just helped him organize a cabinet. She got in and buckled up.