It’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.
“Honeycomb conjecture,” he says at 1:17 AM, like he hasn’t kissed her in front of Casey Kasem and god and everybody, even with a busted arm.
Like he hasn’t been nibbling at her warm, honey-salt mouth for the better part of an hour. Like she doesn’t smell of damp wool and almond soap and the sourdough scent of arousal.
“Mulder,” she murmurs, a cantrip. A spell that must be real because it is his true name from the mouth of his true love. These are the rules.
“Varro in 36 BC, but only just proven.” He kisses her again, her mouth so wide, and sweet as well.
Scully’s lush mouth, the click of Scully’s teeth and the weight of Scully’s breasts against that flimsy blouse. A glitch, a snag, an unfurled dimension in the homeomorphic strings.
“You know Thomas Hales?” She pulls back, props herself up on her elbows, gazing down in what can only be described as adoration.
Scully’s lashes like the fibers of a dusting brush, Scully’s hair like Dragon’s Blood fingerprint powder.
He beams up at her from the bed, the way her aristocratic cheeks are a little bit soft from this angle. He wants to kiss her lovely bones, wants his face between her firm thighs but there is so much time. They have nothing but time at the end of the millennium.
Is it the end of the world? He’s fine with that, he’s so fine to die here. She tried to die for him once; let’s die together, Scully, if we must. Even if it’s zombie bites.
Eyes of lapis lazuli. Eyes of a Renaissance Eve in the sweet tropic warmth of the Garden. Eyes like the Mariana Trench.
“I knew you would. I looked up things to impress you.” He has no secrets now. He has no shame; not with her.
Her eyes widen, hot blue stars that usuallly die young. But she is still years in remission and he nips at her mouth as though there isn’t a star in the cool white flesh of her belly as well. The aftershock of Ritter’s gun, even after so long, like cosmic microwave background. Echoes of the first explosion.
“Mulder,” she says, and he loves her and loves her and loves her. He would bite from the fruit that the woman gave to him; he would always want to know what she knew.
He thought about killing Ritter. He thinks about killing Ritter.
He will have thought about killing Ritter.
If he warms her skin enough he can burn Ritter away. Schnauz and Jerse and Waterston and all the other men who have not deserved to touch her kidskin body. To breathe her air. He ignores the details; he makes her into a palimpsest, untouched by the unworthy. Sacred. Virginal.
He does not contemplate whether she would want this absolution.
“They can be non-Euclidean, honeycombs,” she mumbles, her breasts warm as summer peaches. Hot in his hands, but if he tastes them now he can never taste them for the first time again.
Dear Diary, today I discovered that Special Agent Dr. Dana Katherine Scully MD has breasts like a naiad. The Captain’s daughter, of course, of course. The Captain’s daughter tastes like a Quonochontaug summer. Funnel cakes and lobster rolls and whitecaps just before the lightning.
Is she real? She must be. She is a thunderstorm in August. She is dark wet earth in April. Her nipples are raspberries in June.
She is a forbidden, fallen angel. Human kindness, altruism. All the ways we fall short.
“It was postulated in 36 BC. It was postulated before Christ.” Her thighs tight as drumskins beneath his palms, her own cupped palm over his straining fly.
Mulder allows himself the luxury of leaning in, of pushing himself against her, as the year dies. Is born.
“God,” she says, in wonder. Tightens the thick muscles of her hand around him. Sucks at his tongue and his chin and the curve of his brow.
Nipples back in his mouth, the tautness of them. The sweet, ripe heat. He’s a dazzled teenager in the velvet dark as he kisses her mouth, her clavicles, her beautiful hands like white stars.
“Please,” she says and it’s both vague and devastatingly specific. Her fingertips, her eyelids, and the cool bridge of her regal nose.
She wants him, him, him. Her hand curls, her mouth sucks like wet sand at high tide. Nips like the biting sting of a jellyfish on a forgotten summer morning.
Scully tugs at her trousers. Tugs at his. He helps her along, straining now only against his boxers, against his own desire. His damaged arm, her professional concerns.
“Mulder,” she hisses, a shantung voice. That sourdough scent again, absolutely maddening. She thumbs the head of his cock and he wants to grab her in some primal caveman way he didn’t know was in him. Wants to fuck her until she’s flushed and raspy and all hot lower brain need.
Her trousers have slipped down, just nylon and cotton and the last part that has a shred of propriety, some social hymen he wants to make bleed.
“Scully,” he says, grinding against her. Claiming her warm-milk body, her glacial eyes. The nascent year. He thrusts past her hand into the hot crease where her thigh meets her underwear.
She arches back, cries out a little, and she’s hot as chamomile tea and goose down comforters and flannel pajamas and all of the other luxuries she’s brought back to him, like lost treasures to a prince in a fairytale.
“You sure?” he sighs and prays to a god that he doesn’t believe in.
She drags the crotch of her cobweb panties aside in reply, clamps her thighs around him like a bull rider.
“Mulder,” she moans, and the third time binds and he’s probing and then thrusting and then spine deep in the scandalously drenched, blissful heat of her.
Scully’s little claws in his bruised shoulder, Scully’s silent tears on his bottom lip. Her nose still cool against his cheek but her belly scorching.
Stars dance like they do. Angels, too, on the head of a pin. It’s cosmic and base and perfect and clumsy and he says “Scully, Scully, I -“
“Don’t stop,” she gasps, and he doesn’t.
Later, he thinks, they made their son here. It only took a bit for the universe to catch up.