Chapter Text
“Mulder?”
He doesn’t notice when the door creaks again, but turns his reddened eyes towards it when he hears her voice, a bit embarrassed, almost childlike. He’s embarrassed too, lying on the bed with his softened cock posed on his thigh. He presses his eyes, poorly trying to conceal the tears he’s just shed, then reaches for the sheets to cover his modesty.
She’s on one of her satin pyjamas, a delicate shade of pink, and he can’t avoid a small smile when he realizes how well it compliments the flush he sees in her cheeks when she’s just come. It’s the one moment of their wild rendezvous in which he finds a glimpse of tenderness — when they look at each other at the high of their climaxes.
“I’m sorry… the mattress in my bed has a few loose springs, they feel broken. It’s impossible to sleep.”
Instantly Mulder turns his back on her to put his boxers on. He then grabs the pillow that still smells of her and moves towards a small loveseat by the window. He doesn’t say a word, afraid to let something slip that he doesn’t want to.
“What are you doing?”
He looks hesitantly at her before answering.
“You take the bed, Scully.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Mulder doesn’t hesitate, but continues a vain attempt at making room for his humongous form on the loveseat. He fluffs the pillow and sinks face down on it, contorting into a foetal position so that his legs don’t hang off the improvised bed. The next thing he feels is Scully’s hand poking his shoulder.
“Don’t be silly, Mulder. Come on, we can share the bed.”
“I don’t want to.” he answers, his voice muffled by the pillow.
The way he feels her hand retreat, he can tell she’s hurt. He hears the rustle of satin and cotton sheets as she moves away, then tucks herself in bed. When he doesn’t hear any sounds that tell she’s fallen asleep, he takes a risk, unable to deny himself his own feelings any longer.
“I can’t do this anymore, Scully.” he goes on when she doesn’t reply “I’m sorry, but it’s too…”
Her voice seems far away, her back at him.
“Too what, Mulder?”
“Too painful.” before he sees, he hears her body turning under the sheets to watch him. He gets up, holding the Scully-scented pillow, and sits cross-legged on the bed with it on his lap. “I don’t want to use you as relief for my sorrows, and I don’t want you to do the same to me. And I don’t want us involved in this way, just to pretend it never happened. Geez, Scully, I lo-... you’re my best friend. I care too much about you.”
Scully’s speechless. She knows she must say something but can’t find it in her, as if her vast vocabulary suddenly regressed to a toddler’s mumbling. She watches his head fall, and a sniff fills the room too loudly in the silence of the late night. When her hand reaches out to his face, she dries his tears and he leans into it. They find solace in each other, in that gesture. A kind of solace they’d never found in sex, not in the way they’d done it. Another switch’s just been flicked, by the touch of a hand on a watery cheek.
“Mulder…”
Her hand guides his face towards her, and after all these years, Mulder allows him to remember the way her lips taste. She kisses him with the greatest tenderness in the world, pouring into him the love she kept encased within for so long. She knew it to be love by now. When their lips part and their tongues and arms entwine, their desire no longer feels desperate. In languid, sensual and loving gestures they bare each other, touch, savour. For the first time, there is playful foreplay, ticklish and giggly, and there is worship, reverence to each other. There’s respect, and there’s love, no longer buried or denied. They don’t need to give it a voice, but profess it in every gesture, every touch.
This night, in this crummy motel just like countless they’ve been to, they share a bed and have sex.
Feels like the first time. In all the ways that matter it is, this is them making love to each other. But the bliss Mulder feels when she comes under him, dragging him along to his own ecstasy, that doesn’t change. Neither does the beautiful shade of flush on Scully’s cheeks.