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“Wait, what?”
“What?”
“First you took me to Roswell and now, honest-to-your-God, Scully, we are on a North facing highway that stops in Memphis. If we are going to Graceland, I might just pop my stitches and bleed all over this car.”
“We are not going to Graceland, Mulder.” His face fell faster that Langley’s when Scully once, for fun, told him that the Ramones were a terrible group. Scully saw it out the corner of her eye, then continued, “it’s an over-rated, kerfuffle of horded crap worthy of the dumpster and not much else.” Reaching across the car, Mulder gently placed his palm on her cheek, then simply held it there, at least a minute passing until finally Scully cracked, “what the hell are you doing?”
“Waiting patiently until you retract your sacrilege against the king. Until then, my hand will remain in its place on your face.”
“Mulder.”
“Yes, blasphemer?”
“The King is dead.”
His hand remained for another three minutes until Scully began softly humming ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and he pulled away, “I knew it! You are a terrible, terrible person and I am going to make you sit in the Jungle Room for an extra ten minutes.”
“Ppssht. I’m only taking you because what is a paltry 400 extra miles when I’ve already driven you across the country … two countries actually?”
He dug in the center console and retrieved the thing he’d been hiding.
Gently, he poked her on the arm, then pulled her hand towards him, opened her palm and placed there their last red M&M.
Biting it in half, she handed the second part back to him.
They shared their candy love in silence.
&&&&&&&&&&
After about an hour in the car, Mulder meekly asked if she’d pull over so he could lay down in the backseat. His head was pounding and his stomach roiled from it, the motion of the car and making sure he didn’t bump his head. His muscles ached and the speed of the landscape moving past made his eyes hurt. All in all, even the prospect of Graceland wasn’t enough to keep him comfortable.
Shifting luggage and bags, she helped him settle down, pillow beneath his head, feet pulled up, bare foot pressed against the closed door with his cast resting on his leg, “how’s that?”
If he could have kept her cool hand on his forehead, he would have. In his muddled, half-dazed brain, he wondered if maybe he asked, she would crawl in the back seat with him and cool him off with those smooth fingertips of hers, putting out the fire pounding in his brain.
But the soft pillow won out, him slipping into sleep before he could form more than the first syllable of, “ple …”
He slept two hours without movement, Scully in the front seat, reaching back every few minutes to make sure he was still breathing, warm enough, cool enough, stable enough not to roll off the seats. She spent a lot of time in the quiet, not wanting to bother him with the radio but after awhile, she began getting what Mulder called ‘crazy eyes’ so she began humming, first ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ then the rest of the Elvis catalogue her mother loved and had played constantly throughout her childhood.
She then moved on to Motown, eventually progressing to singing when humming stopped working.
After that second hour passed, though, even singing wasn’t cutting it. Pulling over in the nearest rest area, she parked under the shade of the tree-lined back lot. Careful to put the seat back so she didn’t squish his face, she turned on her side and fell asleep immediately, window cracked for fresh air and hand resting on Mulder’s knee.
He stirred when she parked but then drifted off again, waking only when he heard a truck’s rumbling diesel engine drive past behind them. Seeing the crown of her head not far away, he reached up, playing with the escaped curls hanging down over the back of the seat.
She must not have been sleeping too soundly because her hand, still on his knee, squeezed the joint lightly, her voice sleepy but waking up, “hi.”
“Morning, sunshine.”
“It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, Mulder.”
“Afternoon, sunshine.”
Twisting, she struggled until her elbows were under her and her head resting on her chin, staring at him, eyes red from sleep, “how’s your head?”
“Okay for the moment.”
Scully reached out, touching his temple briefly, “no fever, headache, chills, blood pounding in your stitches?”
With a smile, “I am alive. Let’s just leave it at that for now.”
“Then ready to get moving again? Want to come back up here or stay lying down?”
Already making to move, “I’ll come up there. I can make song requests easier that way.”
“You heard me?”
“And I loved it so don’t get all embarrassed and weird about it and never do it again.”
Contorting until she could open the door and slither onto the ground, she helped him balance, then move to the passenger seat, “at least this time, I’ll have the radio for accompaniment.”
Soon, they were on the move again, getting gas, taking bathroom breaks and on Mulder’s part, smuggling bags of M&Ms out to the car in his pockets, having paid surreptitiously while Scully was standing by the gas pump and faced the other way.
He requested three more bathroom breaks before they reached Memphis, buying candy each time until his pockets rattled and he had to deposit them in his backpack in the back of the car on the pretense of getting a racy novel to read out loud to Scully. His reading voices amused her, especially when he arrived at some torrid sex scene that demanded a high female voice and added sound effects.
She nearly crashed the car at one point, having to steer to the shoulder to avoid the unnoticed traffic in front of her. Mulder looked at her, all aghast and fake-angry, “if I die with,” flipping the book around to read the cover, “’The Taking of the Shrew’ complete with Fabio on the cover, I will come back to haunt you.”
“But I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I’ll convince you.”
Checking her mirrors and pulling back onto the road, “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
“Shall I go back to reading?”
“Of course.”
Eventually, they arrived in Memphis, no worse for the wear but once she did get out of the car, Scully immediately bent at the waist, her spine cracking from neck to tail. She hung her arms down for a few moments until she saw Mulder’s crutch ends appear in her vision, contrasting with the dark asphalt paving of the hotel parking lot.
“You all right there, partner?”
“I need to lay down.” Slowly righting herself, she put both hands on her lower back, “and I need to go for a run later. I sat too long without a break.”
“Preaching to the choir again, Scully. I would kill to run even to the other side of the lot.”
Frowning in sympathy, “maybe we can get you in a pool for a little while, let you swim a little if you swear you won’t move your leg.”
“What about the stitches in my head?”
Patting his hand briefly where it curled around the handle of his crutches, “you are a mess, I gotta say.”
“Come closer and say that. I’ll take you out with my whacking sticks.”
And for that, he got a look of amusement that proved once again that she had a very dirty mind.
&&&&&&&&&&&&
His headache calmed enough to manage another nap before going out in search of the best BBQ in Memphis. Find it they did, coming back to the hotel covered in sticky sauce and with leftovers enough to feed them for two more meals. Scully headed straight for the shower with Mulder discovering he had to pee only after he heard the shower curtain close, the water already on full.
Knowing he couldn’t wait, he knocked on the door, then turned the knob, happy to find it unlocked. “Hey, Scully? Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”
A quick check revealed a solid shower curtain, “sure. Only to pee, I hope. If you need it for something else, I’ll get out right now.”
“Nope. No pooping, promise.” Once he was done with that, he washed his hands, then leaned back against the sink, staring at the disappointingly opaque plastic barrier between him and his suds’d-up partner, “need any help?”
First, he heard the bar of soap drop, then, following a higher pitched octave, ‘no, thank you’, he heard the plastic thump of the shampoo bottle hitting the bathtub bottom. Grinning, “you all right in there?”
“Just fine.”
Enjoying his position at the moment, “I was thinking that after we finish here, maybe we could go to Kitty Hawk in North Carolina; do both oceans on the same vacation before we go home. I know they have house rentals right on the beach so maybe I could call a real estate place and see if I can get us one for a few days?”
Inside the shower, ever since she said he could use the toilet, she’d been a clumsy mess. Soap dropping, shampoo dropping, washcloth dropping, she was afraid to use her razor for fear of accidental suicide by artery slicing on her ankle. She knew exactly why she suddenly turned into this awkward mess of an individual and it made her stomach flutter and twist, heart pounding in her chest. She was very wet and very naked and the only thing keeping him from seeing her was a flimsy-ass piece of plastic that kept sticking to her elbows.
When he mentioned North Carolina and a beach house, she kept her composure even though she had the sudden vision of secluded wrap-around porches and sand dunes and quiet, cozy living rooms with plaid couches overlooking churning waves and dark, stormy skies. She came back down to Earth long enough to say, in a voice she hoped didn’t hitch, “sounds good. Never been there. Can I surf?”
He was a profiler for the FBI for God’s sake and a trained Psychologist who had been with the same woman for the last six years … he heard the hitch.
And he grinned, “well, then, I’ll leave you to your showering and I’ll go see what kind of place I can find for us. Two days from now, you think?”
“Maybe three or four. It’s another 1000 miles, I think.”
Moving from amused arousal to dumbfounded admiration, “how the hell do you know mileage everywhere?”
Politely thanking God for the distraction, “I’m the navigator, Mulder. It’s what I do.”
“You frighten me sometimes.”
“Thank you.”