Chapter Text
It’s past 9:00 pm when Scully finally accepts that she’s sick. Allergies, overtiredness, and the sinus-drying impacts of air conditioning were all hopeful contenders, but when her muscles begin to ache she picks up the phone to tell Mulder that she won’t be in tomorrow.
A sick day doesn’t sound completely terrible; at least she’ll get to catch up on sleep, but she can easily predict that Mulder will insist on coming by to bring her an endearing but inevitably odd care package consisting of chicken soup, hot tea, DayQuil, and a recent issue of National Enquirer, among other curiosities. She’ll feel embarrassed about looking terrible, and he’ll give her a thinly veiled compliment that draws unwanted attention to the undercurrent of sexual tension in their relationship, which she will then dwell on for the next 2-4 weeks. Splendid.
She hits speed dial #1 and flops down on the couch while it rings, already dreaming of the lengthy bubble bath she plans to treat herself to in what would otherwise be the middle of her workday. Maybe she’ll even order in for lunch.
“Hey, I was hoping you’d call back.”
She’s caught off guard, and briefly considers the possibility that she already called him but forgot about it in her congested haze.
“You were?” she asks, surprised by how raspy her voice sounds. This cold seems to be progressing quickly.
“I figured the call dropped,” he says, and it sounds like he’s on the move. She can picture him walking around his apartment with the phone tucked between his ear and shoulder; he never stays still for long.
She’s still rather confused, though, because she’s almost certain that she hasn’t spoken to him since they both left the office a few hours ago.
“What were we talking about?” she asks, then holds the phone at arms-length while she clears her throat. “When the call dropped, I mean.”
“My partner,” he says.
His partner? Is he seeing someone? A little flush of something between embarrassment and jealousy warms her cheeks.
“What about…them?” she asks, touching her forehead with the back of her hand. She doesn’t feel feverish, but this conversation is rather disorienting.
Mulder chuckles a little, and now she feels stupid on top of everything else.
“Come on, Electra, don’t be coy,” he says in an unfamiliar singsong voice. “I think you’ve probably paid off your mortgage with all the money you’ve made listening to me talk about her.”
Electra? Maybe she should get the thermometer.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she admits.
Mulder laughs again, and the pitch of it makes her belly tumble. He’s being downright flirtatious.
“I appreciate your effort to maintain the facade,” he says lightly. “You’re a true professional. That’s why I request you, you know. When you’re not available they always ask if I’d like to talk to another girl, but I never do.”
She realizes at this point that Mulder thinks she is someone else. Someone named Electra. Someone he pays to talk to. She opens her mouth to speak but her jaw just hangs there, stunned into silence. The fact that he thinks she’s his 1-900 girl is embarrassing enough—for both of them—but the fact that he’s in the habit of talking to his 1-900 girl about his partner—her—is both enthralling and horrifying.
She should tell him it’s her. No—she should just hang up so he never has to know. That would be the kindest thing to do, really.
“Electra?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she sputters, sitting up on the couch. “I’m here.”
“You okay? You sound…different.”
She should hang up. She doesn’t.
“I think I’m getting sick,” she says, which is true.
“Ah,” he says knowingly.
“So, um…” she tries, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed by guilt and curiosity. “What were you saying about your partner again?”
Mulder heaves a sigh.
“I was asking whether you think it’s misogynistic that she’s always submissive in my fantasies,” he says casually. “I think that’s when the call dropped, so I didn’t get to hear your answer.”
Scully’s entire body flushes, and she quickly looks around her apartment as though someone might be overhearing their conversation.
“Um…I guess it depends,” she answers, trying to think beyond the fact that Mulder has sexual fantasies about her so that she can actually engage in this conversation. “What’s the nature of the fantasy? Is it degrading?”
“No,” he says quickly. “Not at all. More like…” She hears the rustle of fabric, and she imagines him lying down on his recently acquired bed. “More like she wants to give up control.”
“Tell me about it,” she says, and as soon as the words leave her mouth her eyes widen. Surely she did not just ask him that. But apparently Electra did. “So I can tell you if it’s degrading,” she adds.
Mulder hums wistfully and she feels a hearty throb between her legs. This is objectively wrong. She should stop.
“There are several variations, but I’ll tell you my favorite one,” he begins. “She’s in a shitty mood, and she’s acting pretty bitchy.”
Scully scoffs reflexively, then cringes at her slip-up.
“I didn’t say she was being a bitch,” he corrects. “And you know it turns me on when she’s like that. I mean it in a complimentary way.”
“Right,” Scully says, feeling flustered between pretending to be Electra and gathering so much surprising information in such a short amount of time. He likes it when she’s a bitch to him?
“Anyway, she’s cranky and irritable, and we’re at the office,” he continues.
She’s picturing it now in her head, the two of them in the basement office, and Scully in a bad mood. It’s easy enough to imagine as it’s a semi-frequent occurrence.
“She says something to me, something derisive, and I snap at her and suggest that she needs an attitude adjustment.”
“Uh-huh,” Scully says, hanging onto his every word in eager anticipation of what comes next.
“I think it’s pertinent that I’m already hard,” he says.
“In the office?” she asks.
“No, I mean right now, while I’m telling you this. I’m already hard and it’s not even to the juicy part yet.”
Scully squirms on her couch, ashamed, and uncomfortable, and decidedly aroused. Mulder’s erect penis is something she’s given more than a passing thought to, and knowing it’s right there on the other end of the line is certainly captivating.
“...Wow,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say.
“So I tell her she needs an attitude adjustment, and she says ‘then why don’t you give me one?’ a little bit haughty, like she’s daring me because she doesn’t think I’ll do it.”
“And then what?” Scully asks, perhaps a little too eagerly.
Mulder groans softly, not at all attempting to hide it, and she starts to squeeze her thighs together rhythmically.
“She’s wearing a skirt,” he says, his voice husky. “I walk over to her and I grab her by the waist and pick her up, put her on top of the desk.”
“Your desk?” Scully asks. She wants to be sure she’s picturing it just right.
“Yeah. I put her on top of the desk and she’s looking at me like…like what the fuck are you doing ? But I can tell that she’s curious. She wants to see what I’m going to do.”
Scully is having the same experience as the version of herself in Mulder’s fantasy. She desperately wants to know where he’s going to take this. Where he wishes he could take it.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna eat her pussy,” he says without hesitation, and Scully sucks in a breath when her clit throbs violently at the idea. “But first I kiss her, ease her into it. She’s a little resistant at first—not like she tells me no or anything—but she’s worried we’ll get caught.”
Scully can no longer resist the urge to touch herself. She slips her free hand under her pajama pants and sighs with relief as her fingers glide over her slick lips.
“Are you touching yourself?”
She snatches her hand back and sits up, then looks around, half expecting to see him standing in her kitchen.
“What?” she stutters, embarrassed and confused.
“I know you aren’t actually doing it,” Mulder says, his voice momentarily returning to its normal cadence. “But I thought you might humor me.”
“Oh,” Scully says, sinking back into the cushions as her racing heart begins to slow. “...Are you?”
“Of course,” he says, and she knows that he is not pretending.
“Then…yes, I am,” she says, sliding her hand back under her pants. “Please continue.”
“So we do this whole ‘we can’t do this here, it’s against policy’ bit, which I’m a huge fan of. Maybe that’s fucked up, but I like to imagine that she tries to resist the urge on principle, but she can’t because she wants me too much.”
Scully is reminded of an occasion on which she slipped one of Mulder’s well-worn tapes out of the bottom drawer of his desk and into her purse, curious to see what kind of porn he gravitates towards. In the privacy of her apartment, she’d been surprised and intrigued to find that the tape was a series of clips from different movies, all depicting covert trysts between people who expressed first that they should not be doing what they were about to do, and then what they were doing, and finally what they’d just done.
“I don’t think that’s fucked up,” she tells him, sinking her middle finger into her cunt to the second knuckle.
“I take off her jacket, and unbutton her blouse, and then I just pull her bra down to get at her tits. I don’t even bother taking it off.”
She never imagined that Mulder would be inclined to use the word “tits,” but she’s surprised to find that it doesn’t bother her one bit. She’s much more interested in what he plans to do with her tits than she is with what he calls them.
“She has incredible tits,” he says, and she realizes that he’s speaking from an informed place because he’s seen her nude. Given, she was half dead, but it seems she still managed to make an impression, which is oddly gratifying. “I suck on her nipples and she’s fucking feral. She just…turns to putty. I know she’ll let me do anything to her. Anything I want.”
His voice has a staccato quality that leads her to believe that he’s stroking himself, and rather quickly at that. Scully swirls her slippery finger around her clit in time with the little hiccups in his words.
“But all I want is to taste her. Make her come in my mouth,” he says, and she knows she’s going to come right here on her couch if they keep this up. “So I tell her to lay back and I tear her pantyhose, then push her skirt up. She’s wearing these little white panties I’ve seen in her suitcase. Lace. I pull them to the side so I can see her.”
Later, she will recall his comment about her little white panties and wonder how many times he’s explored the contents of her suitcase or her underwear drawer. At the moment, though, she’s picturing him looking between her legs with a hungry expression on his face while she finger-fucks herself.
“She’s so wet I can see it running out of her. And her lips are all swollen and—fuck. I can’t resist so I get on my knees and bury my face in her pussy. She tastes so good and I’m so turned on that I get my dick out and jerk off while I eat her.”
Scully is beyond the point of forming words. She’s hovering just before the edge, ready to tumble over at the slightest provocation. She can only hope that he keeps talking.
“She grabs my head and digs her fingernails into my scalp, and I can hardly breathe but I don’t care. I can feel her quivering and pulsing on my lips and around my tongue, and then she moans and tells me she’s gonna come, and her whole cunt is just…throbbing against my face. She comes so hard she knocks half the shit off my desk. And then I come, right on the floor, because I can’t hold back. It’s too good.”
Scully is stonily silent as she comes around her own fingers, imagining that they are Mulder’s tongue and that the press of her own palm is his face tucked tightly between her legs. It’s powerful, rivaling anything she’s produced with her vibrator as of late, and she is only marginally aware of his soft grunts as he does the same on the other end of the line.
As she slowly comes down and the haze of lust fades away, she realizes what she’s just done and acute shame washes over her.
“Damn,” Mulder says, sounding satisfied. There is a long pause while they each collect their thoughts. “So, what do you think?”
Scully blinks stupidly, her hand still resting over her soaking wet cunt.
“About what?”
“Is it misogynistic? The fantasy?”
“Oh,” she says, pulling her hand free and sitting up on the couch. “Um, no, I don’t think so. I think bringing a woman to orgasm with no expectation of reciprocation is about the least misogynist thing I can think of, actually.”
Mulder chuckles.
“Well, that clears most of my other fantasies, then, because that is the running theme.”
“Really,” she says, more an expression of surprise than a question.
“With her, yes,” he says. She wants to ask him so many questions, but he cuts her off. “I think I’m just about at my weekly minute cap before I risk being late on rent, so I better let you go. Thanks for calling back.”
“Right, of course,” Scully says awkwardly, remembering that she is currently playing the role of Electra, the phone sex operator. “Have a good night.”
“You, too, Electra. Bye.”
Scully hangs up and then sits there for several minutes, shell shocked. When the phone, which is still in her hand, begins to ring, she startles so violently she drops it on the floor, then scrambles to fish it out from under the couch.
“Hello?” she says urgently, just before the machine picks up.
“Hey, Scully, it’s me,” he says, and the sound of his voice is like an aphrodisiac, even though it’s been less than twenty minutes since her orgasm.
“Hi,” she says, her voice unnaturally loud.
“Are you okay? You sound weird.”
“I was actually just about to call you,” she says, glancing at the clock. “I’m not feeling well and I think I might take the day off tomorrow to rest.”
There is a noticeably long pause on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “Can I bring you anything?”
“No, Mulder, you don’t need to do that. It’s just a cold,” she insists.
“I’ll bring you lunch,” he says. “You like that soup from the Thai place, right?”
She smiles despite the absurdity of this entire situation.
“I do. Thank you, Mulder.”
“Happy to do it. Get some rest, G-Woman.”
“I will. Goodnight.” She’s pulling the phone away from her ear when she hears him speaking again. “Did you say something?”
“Yeah…um…Did you call me earlier?”
“...What do you mean?”
“Like half an hour ago, did you call me?” He sounds nervous, and she’s not sure what he’s hoping to hear.
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?” he repeats.
“No…No, I don’t think that was me,” she says ambiguously.
Another noticeably long pause.
“Okay, never mind. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mulder.”
Now it is she who speaks again when she’s not sure if he’s already hung up.
“Mulder?”
“Yeah?”
The speed of his answer tells her that he still had the phone to his ear.
“What if I did call you?”
She can practically hear his thoughts racing through the phone.
“...Then I would wonder if I’m still welcome to come by and bring you lunch tomorrow,” he says, sounding markedly meek.
“Of course you are,” she tells him, relieved that he isn’t angry. In fact, he sounds more concerned that she might be angry with him . “But to be clear, we’re having soup for lunch. Just soup. Because I’m sick.”
The overture, while thinly veiled, is so forward that she feels like she might vomit.
“Just soup,” he repeats. “But only because you’re sick?”
Scully pulls in a deep breath.
“I could see myself enjoying other meals when I’m feeling better,” she says on an exhale, then covers her own eyes with her hand.
“Well, then you should get some rest,” he says, and that gravelly, hungry quality from his phone call with Electra has suddenly found its way back into his voice. “We’ll want you back in action as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, I’ll do that,” she says, blushing and cringing and buzzing all at once. “Goodnight, Mulder.”
“Goodnight, Electra.”
He hangs up before she has a chance to respond.