Chapter Text
His best guess is that the guy is an ex-boyfriend. They aren’t too far from Stanford; she could have called ahead and set something up. He doesn’t think she’d pick a guy up at a bar—not that he’d judge her if she did. It just seems unlikely that she’d risk it after what happened last time.
Maybe it’s that hippie guy she told him about. The one who had greasy dreadlocks and played guitar. Or maybe it’s one of her former classmates, some guy who’s a brain surgeon at Cedar Sinai or fixes kids’ cleft palates for free out of the goodness of his heart. Someone smart and accomplished. Someone worthy of her time.
Scully laughs, high and girlish, and Mulder clenches his fists. His fingernails dig into the meat of his palms and it hurts. The physical pain helps distract from the mental anguish, so he digs them in deeper.
She’s been on the phone a lot since he told her about their travel plans a few days ago. At first he was worried that she was talking to her doctor, and his lingering fears about her cancer returning kept him awake all night devising new plans to save her life for good. But then he caught a wide, toothy smile on her mouth during one of those calls when she didn’t realize he was watching her, and his stomach dropped out. The good news is, she isn’t dying. The bad news is, her brush with death seems to have inspired her to live her life more fully—with someone else.
He knows he holds no claim to her, but that hadn’t prevented him from feeling like shit when she turned down his offer to eat dinner together and disappeared into her room the second they wrapped up their fieldwork for the day. He should have gone down to the local bar to drown his sorrows, but, being a glutton for punishment, he stuck around to catch a glimpse of the competition (Tall. Blond. Completely average looking). He watched them get into the guy’s Lexus and drive off, and when they returned a couple hours later he shamelessly peeked through the curtains to see whether she’d kiss him goodnight. The kiss itself was a punch to the gut, but then after several minutes of hushed conversation she invited the guy in, and now Mulder is lying splayed out on his bed listening through paper thin walls as Scully slowly wades into a sexual encounter with someone who probably makes twice as much money as he does and has half as many idiosyncrasies.
He knows Scully doesn’t care about stuff like that. She’s not shallow. But it’s more comfortable for him to imagine that she’s chasing rich doctor dick than to confront the fact that she’d rather get her rocks off with some nobody from her past than give him the time of day. He doesn’t blame her—he knows he’s no prize—but still. He’s always kind of thought there was something between them. Something that meant they wouldn’t see other people, even if they weren’t seeing each other. At least that’s how he felt, and the realization that it wasn’t reciprocal hurts in a way he doesn’t know how to process.
He hears a low, deep moan from the other side of the wall, and something angry and wounded wells up in him. It’s one thing to hear her feeling good, but knowing that she’s pleasuring another man feels like such a betrayal that tears prick at his eyes. He wants to be angry with her for allowing him to hear this, but he went to great lengths to make her think he’d gone out so he could spy on her, including moving the rental car, turning off all the lights in his room, and ignoring her knock at his door shortly before her “date” arrived. He just wanted to see what the guy looked like, but he’s getting a whole lot more than he bargained for. He hears the snap of her bedside lamp switching off and he gets to his feet, not really allowing himself to think about what he’s doing.
He pounds on her door with the side of his fist, his heart blasting in his ears and his jaw clenched. It takes entirely too long for her to answer, though he can hear muffled whispers through the chipped wood and sees a flash of light through the peephole. When she opens the door it’s only wide enough for him to see her face, which is flushed beneath her mussed hair. Her lips are parted and swollen, and she seems out of breath. She looks unkempt and beautiful, and he feels equally relieved and devastated. It’s only after staring at her for a handful of seconds that he realizes he’s going to need to offer some explanation for his abrupt arrival outside her door.
“What is it?” she asks, her eyes flashing over her shoulder and giving her away.
He almost tells her that it’s her mother, but he doesn’t want to make her worry, and honesty is definitely not the best policy in this particular circumstance.
“There’s another body,” he blurts out, and her shoulders sink. “Sheriff just called me.”
“Okay,” she says with a defeated sigh. “Give me ten minutes.”
He pulls the car around and watches her door as he waits for her. He doesn’t see the mystery man, but the lights in her room are still on when she emerges thirteen minutes later and closes the door behind her. He wonders if the guy will wait for her to come back. Lord knows he would.
“Where is it?” she asks as she slides into the passenger seat, smelling like toothpaste and hairspray.
He looks at her while she buckles her seatbelt and pulls down the visor to check her makeup in the mirror. She’s wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with her suit jacket thrown on over top, and he wonders how far they got before he interrupted them. In his experience, the woman’s shirt is always the first to go, and he has an image of her topless against the ugly motel bedspread, her nipple perched between the mystery man’s lips. His cock stirs and he blinks the thought away, disturbed by his own bodily response. As he’s interrogating how he could possibly get turned on by thinking about her with another man, he realizes that she’s staring at him, waiting for an answer.
“By the river,” he says, putting the car in reverse and backing away from their rooms and the scene of Scully’s almost-indiscretion.
She doesn’t ask any other questions, and he certainly doesn’t offer additional information seeing as how he doesn’t have any to give. He’s not even sure if there’s a river in this area. He just drives, mentally mapping how far they are from their point of origin so he doesn’t get lost. The longer they drive, the more panicked he becomes about how to get himself out of this situation. He doesn’t want to take her back to the motel, but he also doesn’t have a body to show her. To his own shame, he makes a Hail Mary plea to the universe that there’s another murder just so he has a reason to keep her in the field.
“Mulder,” she says after a time.
Her tone carries the hint of a question, but there’s an undercurrent of accusation that only he could possibly detect. He swallows and decides to accept his fate. This situation probably can’t get any better, but it can definitely get worse.
“Yeah?” he rasps through a tight throat.
“Where are we going?”
The question has a singsong quality that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It’s how she talks to him when she’s preparing to hand him his own ass. He pulls off on the side of the road and kills the engine, then stares straight ahead through the bug-smeared windshield as she bores a hole in the side of his face with her eyes.
“Are we lost?” she asks derisively, like he’s a stupid child.
“No, we’re just a couple miles off the main drag,” he answers flatly.
“So where’s the river?”
“Not sure if there is one.”
A pause.
“And the body?”
“Not sure if there’s one of those, either.”
He can’t bring himself to look at her, but he doesn’t really need to. He can feel the shifting energy in the car as she works through confusion, suspicion, realization, and then something else that he can’t quite read. The windows are slowly fogging over and he realizes just how sufficiently he’s trapped himself. There’s no obvious way forward.
“Why did you knock on my door, Mulder?” she asks. She sounds afraid of what the answer is.
“I’m sorry, Scully,” he tells her, dropping his head to stare at his own lap. “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Take what?” There’s so much trepidation in her voice that he starts to feel guilty instead of worried about what she’s going to do to him.
“Hearing you—” he starts, then stops. “That guy. I just…I couldn’t.”
The silence is so thick he starts to become lightheaded. He can’t look at her, can’t allow the image of whatever face she’s making right now to be imprinted on his brain. He hears her breathing pick up into quick, heavy breaths that could mean tears or rage, and he waits to find out what happens. To him. To her. To them. Probably, the option of there ever being a “them” is now off the table.
“You were listening to me?” she finally asks him, removing any doubt about how she is receiving this information. She’s furious.
“Not intentionally,” he defends himself, glancing at her only long enough for his testicles to self-protectively retreat into his body. “The walls are thin.”
“You weren’t there, Mulder. The car was gone, the lights were off. Did you—did you hear me knock on your door?”
“I think it’s best that I don’t answer that,” he says contritely, and she sucks in a huge breath.
“What the fuck , Mulder?!” she yells, making him jump. Scully rarely swears, and she’s never sworn at him before. “I am genuinely asking, what the fuck is wrong with you?!”
He does look over at her then. He can’t believe that she’s talking to him this way. Not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because Scully is always careful with her words. He needs some visual feedback to understand what she’s feeling. Her eyes are wide, nostrils flaring, jaw set. But there are also tears pooling along her lash line, and her bottom lip is trembling.
“If I knew the answer to that I would have saved my parents a lot of money on therapy bills,” he quips, inexplicably returning her anger. “It’s not like you were exceedingly discreet, Scully, taking your little secret phone calls all week and then ditching me for the evening. I could have come back at any time, only to walk into my room and be greeted by you getting railed by some Silicon Valley hotshot who hopefully doesn’t give you chlamydia, or worse.”
Her jaw begins to drop partway through his diatribe, and by the end it’s gaping open in utter disbelief. He immediately wishes he could take it back. He’s not even sure why he’s getting angry at her when he knows he’s the one in the wrong. She collects herself, blinking away tears and regaining composure. He thinks she’s going to ask him to take her back to the motel, but she doesn’t.
“I suppose you can’t get sexually transmitted infections from 1-900 numbers, can you, Marty ?” she spits at him, and a flare of shame joins up with his anger. Anger is all he’ll allow himself to feel. The rest hurts too much.
“Yeah, well, pathetic as it may be, I find it a bit more noble to get my jollies from a stranger on the phone than sticking it in anyone who happens to be in the same city as me at any given time,” he shoots back. “I mean honestly, Scully, would I have to be the last man on earth? It’s hard not to take it a bit personally.”
Once again, there is immediate regret. He hadn’t meant to say it, though he’s certainly had the thought many times. He feels her staring at him, but she doesn’t say anything right away.
“Let me just make sure I have all the facts straight here,” she says, too-levelly. It feels like a trap. “You knew that I was having someone over, so you tricked me into thinking you weren’t at the motel in order to spy on me, and then you became so enraged when you realized that I intended to have sex with that person that you practically beat my door down and lied to me to get me away from him because…you think I should be having sex with you ?”
All of what she said is absolutely true, but hearing it laid out in that way makes him sound like a really awful person. At some point he’ll have no choice but to explore the possibility that he is, in fact, exactly that.
“I do not think you should be having sex with me,” he corrects her. “I’m simply drawing attention to the fact that you seem inclined to have sex with anyone but me.”
She laughs and he looks over at her, surprised. Her smile is somewhat crazed, certainly not happy. He suddenly wonders if she might hit him.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she says quite loudly with that same maniacal smile on her face. “Is this a joke? Are you actually sitting here, in this car, right now, telling me that I would have sex with anyone but you?”
He takes the question to be rhetorical, but when he doesn’t answer she juts her chin out and raises her eyebrows at him.
“Is that not accurate?” he asks instead of answering.
“Is that not accurate?” she repeats under her breath, turning her face toward the foggy window briefly. “You know what’s accurate, Mulder? I have invited you to spend time with me outside of work on numerous occasions, and you always say no. It’s also accurate that I have been almost embarrassingly flirtatious with you to no effect. It would also be accurate to point out that I practically threw myself at you when we ditched that damn conference so you could go play in the woods, and you ditched me too.” She pauses, and her anger dampens to something closer to frustration. “I would say what’s accurate is that I have done all but directly asked you if you have any interest in…things being different between us, and you have ignored or declined every single advance. That is accurate, Mulder. So forgive me if I find it just a bit hard to understand why you’re acting like I broke your heart and handed you the pieces because I got tired of waiting for you to look up from your case files and decided to live my life. One that I nearly lost, if you recall.”
He blinks at her, trying to assimilate the information she just unloaded into his mental schema for his and Scully’s relationship. Embarrassingly flirtatious? Threw herself at him? He has no idea what she’s referring to.
“Scully—” he tries, but she cuts him off.
“Take me back to the motel, Mulder,” she says curtly, turning to face the windshield and crossing her arms over her chest. “Whatever you’re going to say, I don’t want to hear it. I’ve already heard more than enough.”
He starts the engine and drives until he finds his way back into town. He doesn’t speak, and neither does she.