#wtid

“Why don’t you sleep over,” Mulder stage-whispered, leaning in beside her. He smelled of whatever he’d been chewing on the car ride over - almonds? - no, seeds, those fucking confounded seeds. “You haven’t been to our new place. It has a guest bedroom.”

“Hotel is fine.”

He hesitated, hovered over her shoulder in a particular way that men generally did not have the temerity to do. Luckily she liked him more than other men, still liked him, even if he was poised to marry the only person for whom she’d ever considered unravelling the tightly wound spool of her existence.  Thankfully, circumstances had not allowed her to make such a mistake. She reminded herself to be thankful often. Forcefully.

“Why?” he pressed.  He was eager to keep her close, Stella knew.  On her better days she believed it was because he cared for her, was her friend. It was also possible he only wanted to be forgiven for winning.  Most days, when she was feeling her cheerfully doubtful self, it struck her as strategic. One distances one’s wife’s female friends at one’s own peril, particularly if said wife has had sex with said female friend.

“I’m not sleeping in your guest bedroom,” she declared in the hushed voice required of their environment.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not your great aunt,” Stella said, her eyes firmly rooted on the hulking shoulders of the man in front of her in the light grey prison uniform. Mulder righted himself beside her, took a sharp inhale. The air was stiff and stale in the room, tasted of chalk. This must be as frustrating for him as it was for her - watching Scully testify on Jerse’s behalf twenty some-odd years after she’d helped put him in jail. Only fair that Mulder was distracting himself with matters of guest bedrooms. 

Ed was taller than Stella remembered.  Also, less nimble, the kind of man who might lose his balance trying to kill a mosquito rather than someone who had  escaped notice as he escorted human beings to their unwanted cremations.  His tattoos had multiplied over the years behind bars - all the faces of girls, and each one turned out to be meaner than the last. Stella and Mulder had both taken turns judging Scully as she made phone calls over the years to keep him out of or remove him from solitary confinement. But even her (arguably inappropriate) kindness had not spared him. Time had passed for all of them, but it had passed hardest for Ed. A courtroom was a very good argument for the health benefits of freedom.

Funny that Stella had always assumed they’d get married in a court and not a church. Scully was Catholic, after all, but somehow she’d always pictured herself in a skirt-suit set and a plasticky smile watching an uncomfortable hour-plus of Mulder pawing gently at Scully as she stood steel-eyed and stiff-jawed before a government clerk, her favorite skeptic allowing an indulgence of incalculable faith. It was enough of a stretch without bringing God into it, maybe.

She had kept her negativity about marriage to herself, had made a concerted effort not to spoil things. It would be unseemly considering. But she had tried to talk Scully out of this, and Mulder had tried too. But Scully was adamant right up until last night’s spaghetti carbonara; there was an uncommon amount of swearing, flame-freckled seething, tossed crumpled napkins and waiters trying not to look. 

They’d relented - what else could they do?   He was her potential murderer, after all, not theirs, and one supposed she was entitled to a certain amount of possessiveness on that account. Many was the sleepless night that Stella had spent cursing the people who had interfered with her plans for Paul Spector. 

The worst part of hearing about the engagement had not been the news itself but the manner in which it was delivered. Scully’s lowered volume, the gentle lovers’ cadence, lips pressed against the mouthpiece, two hands surely cupping the phone.  The worry, the consideration, the sizzling quiet on the other end of the line as Stella rustled up a response she thought she might be able to live with forever.  The grand poetry of it all, the drama and Scully’s quietly feverish attempts to mitigate it. 

Scully, neatly trimmed in burgundy, hair just so, shifted at the small cafeteria-style table where she sat with the other testifiers.  As someone else stood to speak, Stella saw Scully clasp her hands in loose prayer, gaze resting on her fingernails.  She had not turned to look at them since it had begun. Perhaps she was thinking of the first time she met him, trying to reincarnate the moment when she knew him only as an innocent entity. A memory that had been discounted by such drastic measures lived on uncomfortably, vividly, a spider pinned alive and preserved under glass.  

And what about the day Stella had met him? He’d impressed himself upon her almost by accident. It had been a lark, something to get her out of England and keep her busy, but had turned into something she would never forget, scenes in a movie that only later seemed significant. The heavy stench of fear-twinged anger, the impressive composure of the beautiful ginger-faced detective, the nearly imperceptible twitching of her fingers at the table, the lanky male counterpart’s eventual leap at the killer’s throat.  Stella had felt safe and separate from them all, even the killer; she’d ridden the experience like a seasoned surfer, keeping an eye on the two young kids desperately paddling in the frothy tension beside her. That is how she used to do things before Paul Spector had gotten under her skin. Or maybe it was how she used to do things before Dana Scully had. Sometimes, Stella was unsure which had been the bigger danger.

Stella glanced down at the skin of her bare knees and thought maybe she had unravelled a bit over the years after all.

Jerse appeared to be watching the speaker, but with a slight tilt of the head, Stella could see that he was focused on Scully. The others were guards, cafeteria workers, psychologists - but Scully was something else, someone he’d had feelings for, someone who had known him as good before evil. Mulder must have caught the look in his eye as well, for beside Stella, he gave an angry swallow, widened his legs in macho (and pointless) provocation. Stella knew that Mulder’s concern about today was the physical threat of Ed - what he might do if he were out, how his fixation with Scully might manifest into an act of violence or possessiveness. But Scully could handle her own safety well enough. Stella worried instead about the subtler effects - the nightmares, the guilt she might experience wondering who he was luring in the dusty pick-up joints of Philadelphia. Things you could not fix with a lock and key or a sidearm.

But when Scully stood and spoke, it seemed she was not worried about any of these things. Her voice was steadfast and clinical, though it carried a heartfelt quality that unsettled Stella to her core. Stella had heard the rundown of events before - years ago, when she’d asked as a matter of professionally curiosity and Scully had answered as a matter of courtesy. But now Scully spoke of the invitation to dinner and the subsequent date with a matter-of-fact tenderness. The way he seemed before “the voices” had interfered, her belief in an underlying true nature beneath his mental illness. She had been sparing Mulder the nuances back then. Stella had been just an acquaintance. But inadvertently, she’d spared Stella too. For all these years, Stella had not had to look at the inky snake on Scully’s back and think: she liked him. She’d been spared the pain of identifying with how that must have felt. To have been so wrong about someone.

Scully finished without flourish, smoothed the wool skirt at the hips with two hands and sat - still not looking back at them, seemingly alone in her moment, and perhaps rightly so, for this was her unsupported decision. Stella felt vaguely hypocritical for even attending, but then not attending had seemed wronger. 

Snippets of Ed’s report cards were read aloud, brief and modestly generous endorsements he’d received over the course of the years. Mistakes here and there, but a generally cooperative nature, etcetera - no compliment as persuasive as Scully’s sincerity. They were going to let him go - Stella could feel it the way she could sense a confession coming or intuited a multiple murderer’s next attack before he actually crept up someone’s back flight of steps. 

Mulder’s hand startled her as it descended heavily atop her own and quieted her wriggling thumbs. The weight of him in the lap of her skirt made the mucous in her throat thicken - was he holding her hand or asking for his to be held? He tightened his sweaty fingers around hers. There was no reason to cry. This was not her moment. Not her murderer and not her fiancé. She was in the role she’d always found most comfortable - observer. Someone to put in the guest room.

When it was over, Scully stood, looked at the floor and moved toward them like a funeral attendant in the aftermath of an Irish wake - sad, but relieved - attending to the memory of something she’d long past buried.

*

“That tattoo hurt at all?” he asks with a dipped clefted chin and a gleam in his eye that reminds her of her little performance in the shop.  Scully is not even sure why it happened – the booze or the slow burn of the needle or the way he looked at her. It makes her look away for a second now in shyness - the fact that he’s already seen that face she makes.  But she did not call him up earlier to be shy.  She did not sit in a dirty dive all night with a handsome stranger all night to be shy.  She did not break skin, make permanent marks she might later regret to be shy.   She is too quickly running out of time to be shy.

She steals glances at him standing there across the room with his flop of dark sailor’s hair and suggestive sailor’s tattoo and she stammers through something about feeling different. This is true but she doesn’t mean the heavy handed flashart on her lower back.  She supposes she might feel strange the next time she’s at the beach with her mother.  Supposes, the next time, really, anyone looks there, she’ll probably have to laugh.  But nobody ever looks there.  And that’s why she’s here.  She’s responsible.  She’s a woman of faith.  But she’s human, she’s mortal, she knows that more now than ever, even before the doctor’s appointment, and tonight she wants to act like it.  That is what feels different.

He looms over her as he lifts the back of her shirt to peek and she actually believes he just wants a peek.  He’s enormous by comparison, a monument to masculine threat.  He could crush her.  He will try to crush her.  But she doesn’t know that now.  Has no way of knowing that now as he traces the outline of the snake with his finger and tells her it looks all right.  It actually seems like too much of a cliché to fear someone who looks like him, like flinching when you walk down the street past a Doberman. Every cop knows the scrawny ones can be meaner.

She likes him, has liked him from the moment he spoke to her.  She considers herself a good judge of character and she feels in her soul that he is good, but she’s not looking for a soul mate. She’s in the mood for someone who’ll look at her like she’s a problem, not their problem-solver.  Someone who’s not just handing her instructions and checking in. He is not a slap in the face to Mulder. He’s just not Mulder.

He doesn’t leer and he doesn’t suggest.  He offers to take couches and asks her if things hurt.  He’s aware of his own strength even as he displays it.  It may be that none of this counts at St. Peter’s gate, but it will count for something when she’s letting a man a full foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier fuck her standing up.  It will count when he tries to kill her too, but she has no way of knowing that’s what fate – God?  No, not God, that’s not the God she believes in – has in store.

If she were going to stop him, she would’ve stopped him by now.  But instead, she’s telling him she’s a doctor and nothing turns her on like telling people she’s a doctor.  Instead, he’s holding her wrist firmly in the dance partner position, looking down at her like he doesn’t care about his bleeding infected arm as long as he’s got her.  She has wanted to be needed in this way, has been wanting someone who will trade in their other obsessions for five feet two inches and a few hours of her, and she’s been ashamed of that desire.  Then such a person appeared, offered himself up and she’s accepting.  She feels compelled on behalf of her mortality.  Funny - it’s the very thing he’ll turn out to be after.

It’s a quick rundown of events, some of which she’ll be forced to mention later to law enforcement or doctors or both.  She’ll glare and ask them what that has to do with anything as they jot down her perfunctory details.  There are some she doesn’t give. That she reaches for the hem of her shirt two seconds into the kiss, feels his tongue touch her nose when she sloppily backs away to get it over her head.  That he unbuttons her pants as she runs her hands over his chest and his stomach, makes shapes across it with her mouth.  They look for cause and effect, these medical doctors and detectives - she knows because it’s how she normally thinks too.  But the system is working in reverse. The moment his hands graze her ass over her underwear – simple briefs, work underwear, investigate-the-Russian-mobster-underwear – is when she realizes she’s wet.  The moment she drops his pants and puts her hand over his erection is the moment she hopes she’s wet enough.  Effect is what she notices first.

It’s been a very long time.  This might hurt a bit, she tells herself, and gets wetter.

He takes out the condom of his own will but she insists on being the one to put it on him, stares, buying time, as she rolls it down his shaft. It could stop here, she thinks. She could still wake up tomorrow not feeling a bit of regret or the urge to confess, still go into work and not duck from Mulder’s gaze, but it doesn’t occur to her that she could still avoid waking up concussed in a hospital, and that ought to be a fair oversight.

She brushes the infected pinupped bicep by accident, but when she does so, an evil little smile appears on his lips. Blood as permanent as ink itself smears beneath her hand and there is something beautiful about it or something perverse, something she doesn’t take the time to put her finger on because he’s a very good kisser and he can span the entire width and length of her torso with two spread hands, and now he is lifting her with those hands, tossing her up like a lost princess, starting to carry her toward the bedroom.  Just think - Dana Scully, a princess.

“No, here,” she says and so he backs her into the wall as she squeezes her thighs around his thick body.  He shows her with various little touches that he’s willing to take this step by step, but if he does, she’ll lose the nerve, and if she loses the nerve, she knows how she’ll wake up feeling nothing tomorrow morning, because that is how she has woken up many mornings, and she doesn’t think at the time that it might even be worse than waking up in the hospital.  “Fuck me here.”

And then he gets a look in his eye that makes her not care whether there is a tomorrow, not that she has reason to wonder (no cancer moves that fast, has that glib a sense of timing).  It’s a look that says he’s going to ravish her, take her and at the same time sacrifice himself.  It is the look that will haunt her when she’s bandaged and stitched, when she hears of him going to prison, when Mulder makes his stupid, insensitive quips about ass tattoos.

He fucks her with her bra clasp digging into the wall, her underwear pushed to the side, his upper body curled over her like a cobra as he tries to kiss her neck and stay inside her at once.  She lodges her fingernails in the plates of his back lest he drop her, listens to the sound he makes as they penetrate his skin, feels his dick go so high inside her that she’s sure despite all knowledge of anatomy that he’s occluding the base of her throat.

For the moment, with his cock stiff and wholly inside her, she is the threat, the overpowerer. He’s awed by it, grateful for it, and - she’s sure - fearful of it.

“You can do whatever you want,” she orders, “I want you to.”  She hears but barely feels her shoulder blades bruise the wall, any remaining sense she has left sliding out her ears onto the paint job.   He holds her waist very still to the wall as he thrusts upward into her and she tilts her head toward the heavens to moan.  Her eyes burn and her hips ache and she will laugh in a few minutes when he holds her sweetly and still offers to sleep on the couch after giving her a pounding like none she has experienced.

“Come for me, Dana,” he begs and she clutches at his hair, presses her open mouth to his jaw, uses her tongue to try to reach him when she’s not using it to swear, digs her heels into his backside for leverage, consistently pressing the full weight of his hips into her body and she lets herself slide into the deepest, slickest, hardest home plate she’s ever come across.  Or at least that she can remember coming across.   It has been a very long time. As of tomorrow morning, that won’t be true, but then a lot of things won’t be true anymore.

He’s looking at her like she’s the only thing that can save him but the reason she is doing it is to save herself.

*

The decor was sleek and dripped in silver grey, an unslept-in bed at hip height.  There was a photograph of a naked woman in a carnival mask on the wall opposite, the figure’s seductive pout leering over the edge of a dressing-room-style vanity mirror.  The room looked like it belonged in another home - a distinct departure from the oaky, slightly inexplicably Asian-influenced-Americana couple-who-hikes aesthetic of the rest of the townhouse. Sleek and sexy and cool. Nobody’s great aunt would have slept there.

“Hope this is all right,” Scully said behind her, leaning against the doorjamb with pantyhosed feet piled one on top of the other.

“Fine, more than fine.”

“Thank you for staying.”

Mulder’s sports announcers prattled on in the master bedroom down the hall.  The bedroom Scully should be in, would be in by the end of the night.

“I wanted you to be close tonight,” Scully said, punctuating the statement with the kind of breathy chuckle that stood for self-criticism. The days of their holing up in hotels with platonic devotion for a weekend were long gone. Now, Stella stayed in those places alone and Scully visited for dinner or shopping - a pair of regular friends. Scully no longer came to London - Stella’s request - and she did not generally make admissions, however innocently voiced, of wanting her close.

Stella spotted a bronze-brown silk robe hanging on a hook on the back of the door. 

“Pour moi?”

Scully smiled, nodded and Stella grabbed it, turned her back to Scully as she exchanged her clothes for the robe with as much modesty as she could. There was a brass-edged glass bar cart in the corner, fully stocked with red wine and whiskey - the place was a veritable theme park in her honor.  Stella resisted the urge to tease and instead took advantage, tweaked two glasses in one hand, opened a bottle of Macallan’s and poured. Anyway, there was no way to know if the room had been decorated for her because it was meant to court her visit or because there was no one else’s visit to court. They were solitary people, all three of them. It was part of the reason they had held onto each other the way they had.

Scully stepped fully into the room for the first time, rolling from heels to toes like a soft-footed doll in stockinged feet.

“Sentiment get to you?” Stella inquired as her drink pooled, syrupy, in the bottom of the lightly dust-coated glasses. She lightened her tone to a mild taunt in order to refract any impression of flirtation. “Whenever we visit Ed Jerse together we sleep under the same roof?”

“Something like that,” Scully murmured, untouched by the sarcasm. She had known Stella too long, had developed an immunity to it. Sometimes people could say they meant nothing by their sarcasm; with Stella, something was always meant and yet one had to be able to take it in stride. It was not one of her best tendencies but she had never been able to control it.

She handed Scully a glass sympathetically, gestured for her to sit on the bed. Stella sipped and Scully gulped...

“You all right?” 

Scully’s eyes began to water.  She looked at the ceiling, preemptively tightened the skin near her eyes with her fingers. Stella came and sat beside her.

“Do you think it’s wrong, what I did today?” Scully asked.

“You know I don’t see the world that way.”

“But do you feel like…”

“You’ve a good heart, that’s all.”

“I remember when you first told me I was good, do you?”

“Not really.”

She’d always thought it. It was rare for her. Usually she suspected people of things, even when she liked them. Scully stared at her, chewed her lip until it was practically blue.

It would pass. It would pass. It would pass. They had more practice letting it pass than anything else. But this time, it didn’t. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Stella said finally and she meant it.

“You don’t really want me to marry him.”

“It doesn’t matter to me if you marry him.”

“You don’t care if it means you’ll lose me forever.”

“What do you want from me, Dana.”

She’d said it quickly, not meaning to, was immediately angry with herself for doing so.  But Scully’s shoulders softened, some long-suffering secret released.

“You sent me back here for my own good, didn’t you? Because you knew about William. Not because you wanted me to go. I need to know.”

That was three years ago and in that time Stella had gotten the hang of her being gone. This was no time to undo that, not with an engagement pending.

“I sent you back because I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said methodically.

“You couldn’t do it every minute of every day-”

“No - not with anyone-”

“But you could do it sometimes.”

“What does that matter?” Stella said, her voice rising into the tight part of her throat like a trapped scream. Fighting with Scully was like fighting with a teenager sometimes - ridiculous and yet impossible to come out on top. Stella always had the urge to tell her not now, you’re tired, you’re emotional, and yet, there was always a devastating honesty to Scully’s behavior when she was being influenced by such feelings. “You want something constant, that is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed. But it doesn’t mean I need everything to be constant.”

Stella’s head ached - she shook it, rubbing her temples, sipped her whiskey.

“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” she said, sorry that she’d come here.

“I’ll stop,” Scully said. “It’s been a long day.”

Stella drank. Yes, a long day. Scully was tired, emotional, deserved a pass.

“Can I lie down?” Scully asked.

“It’s your house.”

“It’s your room,” Scully said and Stella couldn’t help but smile a little.

She let the Scotch burn the back of her throat a bit as Scully scooted back on the bed, dropped herself into the center of a stack of white linen pillows, put her buttoned-up wrists by her ears.

Stella lay on her back until the remainder of her anger dissipated into the plume of Scully’s perfume. Stella pictured Scully dressing, powdering this morning, pretending to herself it was like any other day. She turned onto her side, placed her hand carefully in the center of Scully’s sternum, carefully avoiding the structured brassiere swell on either side. A warm heartbeat patted at her palm.

“Aren’t you uncomfortable in these clothes?” she asked. 

“Deeply.”

“Want to go change?”

Scully shook her head no.

“May I?” Stella asked as her hand drifted button by button down the front of Scully’s shirt. “I won’t touch you, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Scully said. 

Stella half-smiled, flicked the front clasp of the bra, dragged the side zipper down Scully’s hip and finally rested her hand dutifully on the comforter next to Scully’s still wool-crepe skirted, nyloned thigh.

“I’m still deeply uncomfortable,” Scully said, face turning toward her, the malted, woodsy scent of alcohol drifting on the air between them.  A forest, an orchestra pit full of string instruments, hollow and waxed and just removed from velvet cases. “I am actually more deeply uncomfortable than before.”

“Sorry.”

Stella held her breath, her nipples hardening against the silk of the borrowed robe as Scully licked her lips at her, breathed with her whole body so that her open blouse slipped from her chest to her sides. 

“Want to kiss me?” Scully asked.

Goddamit.

“He’s down the hall.”

But she was salivating, tasting Scully, the memory of her.  It had been years. Scully slithered out of her clothes, shedding them like snakeskin, looking new as she lay back down on the pillow.

“I dare you,” Scully whispered.

Stella brusquely threw a knee over Scully’s opposite hip, straddling her as the golden robe slipped its knot.  She shook it down off her shoulders, let it fall to her thighs. Her chest rose, naked and weighted by her heart as she dipped forward toward Scully’s face.

Scully caged her ribs with two hands, traced the black and white tattoo on Stella’s body, draping a finger this way and that in the shape of the rose.

The door was open.  He would hear them.  It would be a betrayal greater than any Stella had ever committed. But she could feel her entire body sinking toward Scully, melting at the heat of her. Muscles trembled, spine withered like an end of summer plant, hips rolled, changes Stella assumed would be imperceptible but Scully’s body moved in response to each one.

She reached down, took Scully’s chin in her hand -

And in a flash of Scully’s eye contact, it all made sense.

“He knew you were going to do this,” Stella said, measuring her surprise.

Scully gulped. Nervous.

“You can live in London, come and go as you please...”

Stella tensed, probably would have moved away but in a burst of effort, Scully reached for Stella’s neck, pulled her close so that she could speak directly into her ear.

“I need you.”

Stella closed her eyes, trying to process the enormity of what was being asked of her but paralyzed by the scent of Scully’s skin and hair and mouth so close.

“I don’t know,” Stella said, her pores sucking up Scully’s skin like the air. She was drowning in her.

Scully’s heart beat faster, she’d begun to sweat, and rightly so. She was gambling with her future - all their futures. Stella wanted to be angry with her but it was impossible. Impossible not to lift her mouth to Scully’s, just briefly enough to leave some of her shimmery gloss on Scully’s lower lip. She paused long enough to settle, to let herself enjoy the certainty of a decision having been made. Sometimes she thought this was the best thing about sex - the rare moment of knowledge, of conviction, of committment. She could not agree to whatever Scully was asking of her, some sort of future promise, but she could agree to right now. The moment would come and go, and in a few minutes, when they were having sex, she would have other ideas about what the best thing about sex with Scully was. With other people, this was often not the case.

“I’m going to fuck you now,” she said. “I’m going to make you pant and swear and moan and we’ll see if your fiance will come down the hall.”

“Do you want him to?”

“I don’t know,” Stella said. “But either of you cries, I swear to God, I’ll never speak to you again.”

She covered Scully’s body from the palms of their hands to the tips of their feet, slipped her tongue into Scully’s mouth before either of them could ruin it by saying anything further.

Chapter 27

He wasn’t sure how he’d feel about it until he saw it. He had agreed to it without reservation. It was even possible to interpret it as having been his suggestion. But still, he could not be absolutely sure how it would feel.  And if he was going to live with it, he needed to see it with his own two eyes at least once. It had always been him or Stella, not both. He’d only shared her once - the first time - and the second time they’d tried had ended in disaster. They’d all kept things separate, Scully in her actions - he doubted she had ever been unfaithful to him when they’d been a couple - and he in his mind. He’d approached his memories of that night with the chastity of a priest, resisted even thinking about it until Scully had made this recent proposition. It was not an unpleasant memory to relive but still, it was a memory.

And now he had arrived at the reality. Stella’s mouth suckling Scully’s nipple in a room wreaking of Scotch and women, her arm’s well-hewn muscles spasming as they worked on Scully beneath the weight of her body, four rounded thighs swathed in a pond of flaxen silk. Scully’s skirt and nylons had been discarded near her ankles, and one of her hands was cupping Stella’s jaw, the other raking up her back. He had waited until he could hear Scully from down the hall, which meant that he had waited until things were very near the end, too near to undo - he could not have stopped them now if he begged. It was a scientific experiment, a matter of proving to himself he could handle what he’d feel.

What he felt when he stood in the doorway to the guest room was hard. Superman fucking hard.

He watched for as long as he could stand it, cleared his throat when he couldn’t stand it any longer. Stella pulled back and sat on her haunches with a well-well-well sort of expression on her face, hair whipping like a blonde gauntlet over her shoulder as she held Scully deep-breathing beneath her palm.

“Come here,” Stella said. He stepped up to the side of the bed, resisting the urge to look anywhere but her eyes. They turned bluer when she made love. Of course - he’d only seen her with Scully. He wondered if they did the same when she was just having sex. “I’m very impressed.”

“With my middle-aged hard-on or my open-mindedness?”

“Both. Have a drink, you might need it.”

She gestured at the friendly half empty glasses left gawking and scandalized on the nightstand. Scully took his hand, squeezed Stella’s thigh with the other. She was in no mood for banter.

“Finish me.”

“You talking to me, honey?” he asked with a slow smile. “Or your girlfriend?”

“Both of you.”

Mulder picked up the glass and sipped - just a bit because he was old enough to be negatively impacted by substances at such critical moments - and then he tipped the glass at Scully’s chest, poured it over her body from navel to neck. She gasped, body rolling like pavement over a growing root. He sat on the bed and leaned to kiss the tip of her drunken shoulder.

They settled in on either side of her,  Stella’s breasts nestled beneath her armpit, his dick wedged against her opposite hip. His arm slid under Scully’s back, his hand pinned by Stella’s trembling belly as she arched it into the hollow of Scully’s waistline. Stella playfully hooked her foot over his leg in the space between Scully’s spread calves. 

“So wet,” Scully murmured and he wasn’t sure if she was talking about herself or the stamp of Stella’s body on her hipbone, but either way it made him desperately want to fuck her.  He settled for a kiss, first on the mouth and then the side of her neck the way she liked as she turned her mouth to Stella.

“Shall we make her come now?” Stella asked without looking at him. Scully’s little ovular  fingertips dug into his skull.

“You want to come, honey?” he teased in her ear, and Stella said something similar in the other, each talking to her as if they had her to themselves, but revelling in the knowledge that they didn’t.

Scully gave a feverish nod yes to all the questions she was being asked, hot tears of simultaneous need and something else - relief? - dripping from her tightly shut eyes. This would not just be the conclusion of a steadily built orgasm, but the proof that her love could carry them all, that she could have the life she wanted but feared was too much to ask.

Their arms draped Scully’s body in the shape of a V, two pageant queen sashes - one ivory, one olive - as they reached inside her together. Stella’s finger was slender and deft against his, leading him sportingly as they found a rhythm they could both live with. Scully hooked her elbow around Stella’s neck, put her hand on Mulder’s cock.

“Dana,” Stella whispered. 

The sound of her so-rarely-uttered first name made him ache like a dirty word. He writhed naked against her thigh, and across from him, Stella’s head hung loose toward Scully’s shoulder as though it might unhinge from her neck. Scully held the center with ease, the flexible crux of an unwieldy machine.

“You’re both so incredibly beautiful,” he said.

Stella thanked him in that a spare, sweet tone she sometimes used but which every time sounded like someone else, and Scully told him to shut up in a voice that sounded exactly like her. Everything slid, slithered - the hand he had wrapped around Scully’s waist bathed in their combined sweat, the whiskey sheen tanning Scully’s chest as she curled it this way and that between them, dipped her tailbone to grind against their hands.

“Good girl,” Stella purred, composed enough even as she gripped Scully’s hip tight between her thighs,. “Good -- girl.”

He lowered the hand up between Stella’s belly and Scully’s waist, bent his knuckles to be of use. Stella found them as she rolled her clitoris from Scully’s hip over his knuckles and back down, delivered a soft fuck from her lips. 

Scully liked it too.

“We’re going to -- take such good -- care of you, Mulder,” she said.

It happened soon after that, the two of them in swift syncopation, Scully moaning and swearing liberally as Stella held her breath, her lips frozen open in the shape of an O. There was a rush of tension and release, sore, slick fingers, wet hair sticking to skin like a sacrament, baptizing a long night to come, and maybe, a new reality.

Chapter 29

The sequence of events was not identical but it was close. A questionable interaction with Ed Jerse that she stubbornly stood behind, come hell or highwater. Stella’s seduction (she had, admittedly, played more of a role in that this time), the precise feminine touch combined with the loving enthusiasm of Mulder’s involvement. And finally, waking up in a bed with him, snoring like a Golden Retriever beside on one side, while Stella’s side was a cool evening desert, bereft of the musky morning jasmine scent that should have been wafting over her shoulder.

Twenty years and somehow she had still not got it right. In some ways she felt they had all been through everything, moved the pieces around in every configuration that existed and she’d landed on a new one, one she knew she wanted best, one in which she knew she could make them both happy. But in other ways, she felt as though she’d been standing still ever since that night, learned nothing, come nowhere.

And more than anything, she was angry at Stella for letting her feel that way. The least she could have done was stayed, told her she hated the idea, rubbed her temples grouchily over a cup of inferior tea while Mulder flipped pancakes. Was that really too much to ask from someone she had known and loved so long?

And in place of that tiny bit of consideration, she’d left a little gift box.

“Sorry...xo” said Stella’s haughty half-script on a prismed, torn-off piece of paper she’d turned into a card.

A hasty unwrapping revealed a shiny little ivory-colored porcelain replica of Big Ben. A delicate and expensive version of something you’d get an an airport. Its base stood in the center of a small dish.

“What’s that?” Mulder grumbled, squinting one eye open. He’d lost some of his voice, left it in one or both of their bodies.

“Stella left us a wedding gift.”

“She left it? You mean she’s not here?”

Scully didn’t answer, so he took the object from her and looked closer.

“It’s a ring holder,” he said. “What does that mean?”

Scully slammed it on the nightstand hard enough to get some satisfaction but not hard enough to crack it. She knew that at a later date, she would cherish this object as the only connection to their union that Stella condoned. She had Mulder had not exchanged any rings - she was no more a jewelry person than she’d been when Mulder had first bought her that Elvis thing and then second-guessed himself. But maybe they should, maybe they would. Maybe she had clung to all the wrong ideas she could have about herself, let all the wrong things slip away into the unlived version of her life. She flexed her fingers over her forehead with a groan.

“She’ll come around,” Mulder said gently. “Let me get you some coffee.”

He was only gone a minute when she heard him calling her name from the kitchen. She joined him, expecting to be shown the spectacle of an ant problem or a pretty bird sitting outside the window or a strange neighbor out to get the mail in a funny outfit - he looked hard when he was aiming to cheer her up.  Instead, the presentation involved a brown paper bag on the table, the oven-y smell of bagels hovering, and Stella... leaning against the counter in the rare odd wrinkled t-shirt, lips pursed, arms folded under her breasts. Scully clung to Mulder’s bare back for protection.

“She came around,” Mulder said.

“Isn’t that getting old?” Scully demanded of Stella, stepping forward, and Mulder sat down, pulled the bag of goodies over. He hesitated to open it in a sudden bout of manners, waited for Stella to answer her.

Stella dipped her head for a deep look at the ground, as though checking to see if she’d stepped on something. Her arms did not uncross.

“Yes,” she said finally with the bluntness Scully imagined she applied to a cold case re-opened and placed unwelcomed on her desk. 

“It’s childish, Stella. I asked you a question, all you had to do was answer it,” Scully pressed. 

“You asked me a question while I was taking your clothes off -”

“Because I thought if I combined it with sex, you’d be more likely to unders -”

“You thought I’d be more likely to say yes. Is there any behavior more childish than that?” 

Scully opened her mouth, made a couple of sounds that didn’t turn into words.

“You’re right, Stell...” Mulder chimed, “Is what Scully is trying to say. She has trouble with that sometimes.”

Scully swallowed her pride, realizing only then that she could let go of both her disappointment and her anger. Stella was still there. They were both there.

“Sorry,” she said softly.

Stella nodded matter-of-factly, uncrossed her arms.

“Eat a bagel and re-ask the question clearly and while I have my wits about me.”

Chapter 30

The neighborhood was full of cobblestone and good bones, svelte-faced buildings painted in aristocrat white, noses in the air as people swept past with briefcases, the damp winter wind whipping chilled hair in their faces.  Scully hugged herself tighter in her long black coat and little white dress, swayed from side to side as she picked a wave of red from across her forehead.  She looked too perfect for this stuffy old courthouse. She also looked nervous.

“She’ll be here,” Mulder said. 

Scully smiled close-lipped, dusted the chest of his jacket, tightened his tie and lied to his face.

“I’m not worried.”

*

When she looked at him here on the courthouse steps, she saw him as he once was, young and bitter, eyes that looked perpetually impressed and a smooth-lipped mouth that looked forever disappointed. She saw their son, the short exchange Stella’s cleverness had allowed her to have with him that day in the park. She saw all the close-calls, the times they should have been parted from one another forever and yet somehow found their way back. They were, as a couple, simultaneously inevitable and a miracle. They were each other’s something old and time itself, their something borrowed.

And Stella - though she’d met her just a few years after Mulder - was still her something new - and that’s how Stella liked it. It was part of the allure of her and the problem of Stella Gibson. She liked to maintain the shiny, silvery lacquer of mystery, and Scully knew Stella worried today would tarnish it. She had considered Scully and Mulder’s offer very carefully, very sensibly, then delivered her answer as she tore bread from the inside of a bagel, a calm voice but a tear in her eye, an embarrassed smile, a mellow-limbed embrace - joy. But there had also been signs of anxiety that day and ever since. It didn’t upset Scully, it only worried her that it might upset Stella. Along the way, Stella had become something else besides the shiny new toy, she had been for some time.

She moved in closer to Mulder as they waited, let her nose rest against his Adam’s apple, a small concession to the  robust unflappability she was determined to show off today. She did not want him to feel his presence meant less to her - it was just that, in this current incarnation of her life, she worried less about losing it. He was sturdier these days, took his medicine and jogged and read novels rather than nonfiction and conspiracy theory websites. He less apt to disappear on her or on himself.

“Maybe we should have stayed at her place last night,” she said.  “Reviewed things.”

“All she has to do is show up, what’s to review?” he remarked casually but through it Scully could see he was more concerned than she was. “You tried her phone?”

“Three times.”

Him too.

“I could go to her place, make sure everything’s okay?” he offered.

“No,” Scully said, her face stoic but her fingers slipping up and down his tie.  The gesture brought him back to the moment and he smiled. His eyes were greener than usual here in the English afternoon.

“Are you sure this is what you want, Mulder? There’s no part of you that would be relieved if we didn’t pull this off today?

He took her chin in hand.

“I’m sure, baby. We’ll do it another day if she can’t make it. Something must have come up.”  

*

What he didn’t say was: we could do it without her.  Because he wasn’t sure that he could.  It was almost perfect, him and Scully alone.  Almost, except that at the same time, always teetering on not-at-all.  Stella’s involvement made it possible somehow, even when she was physically apart from them, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.  They seemed to need her to survive each other. And as stubborn as he was about not needing people, he was also too old, too experienced not to admit when he did.

Suddenly, Scully smiled and he saw Stella getting out of a black cab in a wooly grey dress and the highest heels he’d ever seen. She turned to pay the driver through the window, at first glance betraying nothing but her usual charmed confidence, although upon closer inspection, he could see the way she was gripping her leather clutch with nerve-wrecked white fingertips.

“See? She’s here,” Mulder said and twirled a length of Scully’s hair between her shoulder blades.

She kissed him briefly on the lips and in a moment Stella approached, tapped their cheeks with her own, careful not to smudge her lipstick.

*

“Sorry I’m late.  You look lovely.  What are we doing afterward?”

“We’ll go get you a stiff drink,” Scully said dryly with a tweak to the neckline of Stella’s sweater dress, playing as she’d done moments ago with Mulder’s tie. An excuse for contact, a doctor’s emotional temperature-telling. 

“Drink, yes, maybe several,” Stella said a little more gently, as though she too had merely been awaiting the doctor’s call to feel better. A malady that eased by benign diagnosis. You will not regret this, I will not let you regret it, Scully tried to communicate telepathically as she looked Stella over, but couldn’t quite rein in the eye contact necessary.

“I’m surprised she doesn’t have a flask on her,” Mulder said.

“Who says I haven’t,” and she handed Mulder her little bag.  “Here, just a second.”

She smoothed her dress, checked the backs of her earrings.  Perfume stabbed the air and committed Stella to memory with every flick of her wrist, every twist of the neck. 

“I hate weddings,” she said. “You know that right?”

But Scully was not fooled by the mask of Stella’s comfortable complaints. She busy staring at Stella’s body, trying to place the odd feeling of deja vu and then - 

“I remember this dress.”

And for the first time that day, Stella steadied, really looked at her, let her eyes rest there in the cradle of Scully’s gaze. Her cheeks colored pink a little and her eyes deepened, the greyness of them taking on the hue of brushed denim, the deep hint of indigo. 

There it was, the something else Stella had become, her something blue.

*

It was one of Stella’s great weaknesses that being told she was loved made her want to cry and not in the so happy tears are falling sort of way, but rather in the way of someone falling to pieces. There was only one way she could handle it - in the passive elocution. There were people, mainly men, she’d known over the course of her life who’d somehow learned and observed the rule. One of them had probably taught it to her in the first place.

“You are loved,” her father used to say, or her favorite uncle, or her late-mentor at the academy. “You are missed,” Mulder would sometimes tell her on the phone. But Scully either couldn’t or wouldn’t get used to it. She was restrained in the frequency of her expressions of affection but not in the manner or delivery of them. She gave her love actively, when given.

So of course she remembered the dress, the thing Stella had been wearing that first time.

“Yes, I thought you might,” Stella said, allowing Scully to believe that she’d done it on purpose. She had not consciously thought of that day this morning when she reached for it. But admittedly, there could be no coincidence in such an action. She had dozens of outfits that would have been suitable, in fact two others she’d bought expressly with this day in mind.

“My, you do look lovely, darling,” she added, tingling with warmth as she looked Scully over. More ethereal and yet more solid all at once. “What is it about white that makes a woman look like a new person?”

Actually, all of it was new to Stella except Scully - she was the only thing familiar about this willingness she felt, the generosity of spirit. She was not pretending to be pissed off for having been asked to do this. But really she was self-conscious about not being pissed off. It would have been more comfortable to resent being here, would have felt more herself.

Inside, there would  be waiting to do, the collective and similar but varied anxieties of twenty other strangers pledged to do this same thing this same day. She and Mulder would bicker amiably, tease about who was going to be fucking whose wife later. Scully would hold her head high, pretending to be above it all, threaten them with moving entire affair to a church, but secretly be glad she’d done it here, in the shadow of all the petty tragicomedies of bureaucracy.  They all three were creatures of the system, and they were also its rebels. That included Scully. Sweet, silently subversive Dana Scully, who was sneaking her hand into Stella’s palm, the other already tucked deftly and permanently into Mulder’s elbow.

It had been Mulder’s idea to configure it this way. He’d said it made sense because then she and Scully would be able to visit one another longer. And it would make it easier for her to move to America if she ever wanted to join them there. She had marveled at the breadth of his spirit, his confidence and his love, had been glad she’d fucked him the previous night. But she’d also panicked. She had only just returned from possible escape minutes before.

Scully had hedged when she heard it and fidgeted, twiddled her fingers and smiled shyly as she admitted to approving of the plan. They each took turns making sure Mulder was in his right mind. And ultimately Stella agreed to it because she wasn’t sure any other way would feel binding enough, would serve to remind her that somewhere, someone expected something of her. And if she didn’t feel that, well then what was the point of being involved at all?

Courthouses could be jarring settings for ordinary people but they were familiar to her, and this one in particular. She’d come out of them over the course of her career in all manner of states - furious, indignant, satisfied, vengeful, victorious - all three of them had. When she came out of this one on this day, she would be no more and no less than... married. No one was changing their name. But hers would be a little different because it would be signed on a piece of paper beside Scully’s, with Mulder’s below as the “witness.” 

He would get Scully with his morning coffee every morning. She would get her on vacations, on special weekends, and, somewhere she had never in a million years expected to either get or look forward to getting - on paper.

The law would be involved, black ink and clerks, a mess to undo if needing undone. And the fact of all this did, at moments, make her want to run. But what did Scully deserve if not that?  Her momentary fancies of flight, her panic. That was worth more than her love, it was more than she had ever been willing to entrust to anyone else.

Overhead, a couple of birds scattered noisily from the ancient stony doorway. Mulder and Scully watched them in tandem, eyes arching from here to there with expressions of matching surprise and gratitude. 

“Are those pigeons or--?” Mulder asked, and Scully tightened the lobster clasp of her fingers. “Doves,” she said. “Mourning doves.”

Stella squinted and smiled alongside them in the breeze. For once, for the moment, there was nothing for any of them to mourn.  

And now she flicked her eyes up to note the quality and integrity of his answer, a doctor assessing a patient, if the doctor and patient had spent many years being in love.  And so he could assess back, could see now as she studied him was that though she was happy to see him, there was sadness too.  No doubt this sadness had something to do with Stella’s phone call from the bathroom floor. The realization was bittersweet - a poignant comfort on Stella’s behalf that the heartbreak she’d nursed was shared by the silent party, the dizzying disappointment that that other party was the person he himself was still heartbroken over.

“I’m good, Scully.  You were right about the therapist.”

“Well--”

Normally, she was happy as anybody to accept an I-told-you-so, but she demurred here, waving him off.  He persisted.

“I should’ve gotten help much sooner.  You were right.”

“Okay.  Good.  You look well.”

She turned the menu over, pretended to consider a milkshake.  He’d only seen her actually order one once.  It was as memorable a diner moment as they came - glow-cheeked and kohl-smeared, she’d asked for it with a sigh of relief, as though the night they’d just spent together had earned her some sort of bonus.  Relief.

It had been like making love to her all over again, watching her gaze into the frothy glass, the Redi-Whip level and locking like a canal as she sucked her cheeks in making pinwheels of her cheek and jaw bones.  He had reached over to take it, slurp the remains from the bottom of the straw and she’d slapped his hand away.  When she finally chose something, she possessed it, devoted herself to it. What happened when there were two competing items on the table?

“Any good cases lately?” she asked.  

Strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, her finger physically skimming the plastic cover over these joyful words.

“No… well, some,” he said.  “Hospital good?”

“They’re still a little sore over my long leave, but they’ll get over it.  I’m starting to think about retirement.  I think I could do more good that way, volunteering on my own terms… It’s not like I’d do nothing, but...”

Myriad were the hypothetical topics Mulder loved and Scully hated, but this was one of a few that went the other way around.  She could pass hours daydreaming aloud about what she’d do with free time.  It incited a sense of panic in Mulder, made some voice inside him start chanting, I will work until I die.  He muffled a sigh by coughing into his elbow, trying not to sound annoyed, and waited for her to take a short pause before interrupting her.

“I actually brought you here to tell you something,” he blurted.

She looked up, eyebrows at a two percent incline that indicated she was in no way prepared for this moment.  He picked up the file folder on the seat beside him, but the waitress came by with her pad.  Scully made Mulder go first, buying time she didn’t need, and then ordered her usual.

“And a black and white with whipped cream,” Mulder tacked on at the end.

“No, I’m on a cleanse.  London was all red meat and chocolate and alcohol.”

London, not Stella. As though she’d been in a hotel somewhere alone.

“I’ll have it, then,” he said.  

The waitress nodded as she jotted and Mulder wondered how many people used places to set a scene.  Should he have done it in private, where she could cry or scream or do something else (he didn’t know what)?  It was true, he’d been counting on the fake-leather booth and egg-pan breeze to undercut the drama, but now that he was here with her it seemed more likely to exacerbate the situation.

“Sounds like big news,” she said but lightly, a benign reduction - you, the boy who cried aliens.  She folded her elbows on the table and leaned forward.  “Come on, you’re killing me.”

No sooner did the sarcasm settle than she spotted the mustard yellow folder under his hand and her technicolor complexion went grey.  This news was not we’re going to a basketball game, I’m getting a dog, or I found your favorite sweater, here ya go.  This news required a folder with a standard bureau label on it.

He placed it in front of her on the table, laid his hand flat on top of it so that she’d have to look at him before she opened it.  She knew the moment their eyes met.

“How?” she demanded immediately.  She regarded the folder itself like a bomb, waiting for him to tell her which wire was which.  His heart raced and he tried to remember his patience, tried to quell the urge to rush her into feeling any one specific thing. 

“I wasn’t sure we’d be able to find him at all.  That’s not how we set it up,” he said to stall, and to explain why he hadn’t told her he was looking into it in the first place.  He hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up.  

“And… how?”  she repeated, now sounding light headed, shallow-breathed.

“Working for the FBI for a hundred years has to come in handy at some point, right?”

“Is he…?”  

He reached for her hands, bending forward like a branch, an unexpected gale of guilt curling his back.  Generally file folders appeared when a body turned up.  Of course he should have led with this:

“He’s fine, honey.  Just fine.  Sorry.  I should have...”

She nodded quickly, let out a breath.  

The waitress arrived with the milkshake in a deep old-fashioned glass, a spoon, two straws and the stem of a cherry sticking up out the top. For the first time, he understood Scully’s gravitas around ordering these things.  There was a time and place.  Celebration could turn to sorrowfulness, expectation to terror quickly.  Sometimes you’d be sorry or embarrassed you had a milkshake in front of you. Neither of them touched it.

“There’s a picture,” he said.  “Pictures.”

In slow motion, she registered this development, licked her lips, straightened up as gradually as a puppet, pulled her hand from under his and placed it on her stomach.  Air shifted visibly within her ribcage, rippling her fingers as she tried to support her diaphragm externally.  Condensation began to encircle the base of the glass.

“I know, it’s a shock.  I’d half been hoping Stella told you, even though I asked her not to.”

Her face twitched in confusion.  

“Stella knew?”

He shook his head quickly.  

“Just for a couple days before you came back.  It came up.”

Color reappeared in her cheeks and her fingers went to her temples.  The kind of face she normally made when she found herself in the middle of a desert in a suit in hundred-degree heat, chasing down one of Mulder’s hunches, her how the fuck did we get here again face.

“Sorry -I -?  When did it come up?  How?” she stammered.

“She probably didn’t think it was her place.”

“Why do you talk to each other behind my back?”

“We weren’t talking behind your back, we were talking and it came out, Scully.”  

This was a coping mechanism of hers, to bicker through a loss of control, but sometimes mechanisms malfunctioned, caused damage.  He knew that ‘cause he went to therapy now.  Sometime - definitely not now - he would tell her she should go too.  

“I hate feeling like I’m the last one to know things,” she said.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“I hate that there’s someone who can make you come faster than I can.”

She startled, almost laughed, but couldn’t - that folder was still here, in the room, staring her down, just like the milkshake.  

Her eyes moved over the edge of the piece of cardboard, as though it required planning - how does one open a file folder that contains the son you gave away? He tore it open for her, a Bandaid off a scab.

Mulder wasn’t there the first time Scully laid eyes on their son.  He’d had to guess at the way she must have marvelled, the beauty, the awesomeness of it.  No telling how he might have held up then, how that experience might have toughened his tolerance so that now thirteen years later he might not fall apart watching this second first-time.

His chest tightened, tears freezing somewhere between his eyebrows to avoid falling.  Across from him, Scully shed them with sensible abandon, weeping as science intended, peeling the surfaces of her eyes away like dead skin, leaving behind something new and unprotected, something healthier but easier to wound.

There was a school photo of William, a close-up, and then a few surveillance photos that had been taken at a distance.  Mulder had insisted they take no chances disturbing the boy, so these were a little blurry, taken at odd angles, slightly refractory images.  You had to use your imagination in order to piece him together.  But Scully stared, tracing a finger over his profile like he might pop up from the paper and sit with them.  What would he order if he could join them, Mulder wondered?  

He was tall for his age and pouty-lipped, possessed of the pronounced Mulder brow.  But he had Scully’s eyes and his skin was so fair he looked like he’d get a burn just turning the lights on.  And there was one odd thing -

“He’s blonde,” she said finally, mystified.  

“Yeah. Tell Stella I want a paternity test.”

She smiled and laughed, held a napkin to her upper lip to blot the snot.  

“There’s some information, too,” he said.  “It’s mostly, well, you’ll see.”

She flipped nimbly through, taking it all in like one of the old casefiles she’d had to cram before she got out of the car.  As in those cases, there was little to go on.  A tonsillectomy.  One school change to enter a gifted children’s program, a broken arm when he was ten from falling off the edge of a staircase, climbing up the wrong side of the rail, an activity which had almost gotten him kicked out of the fancy school.

She looked up, topmost edges of the papers trembling over her knuckles.  Her fingers were ripply at the knuckle, but her hands were still lovely, expensive looking - little blown-glass figurines that would outlast every piece of furniture in the house.

“He’s fine?” 

“Yeah.  He’s fine.”

William’s life was average in the extreme.  It was regular.  It was everything they could have hoped for.

She put the photos down in a neat pile, straightened her shirt, her lipstick, her hair, pushed the file folder closer to the center of the table beside a ceramic bed of sugar packets.  In a moment, food would arrive and they’d have to pack everything up, put it on a seat to her left or to his right, but for now it sat evenly between them.  Just as much his as it was hers.  

She scratched her lips thoughtfully, tapped the other set of fingernails on the table.  

“He’s fine,” she said, this time quietly, talking to herself, or to the folder, or maybe to God.

And then her gaze settled on Mulder.  It lingered there as the waitress balanced their food on her shoulder, placed down little dishes of overly cold butter and plasticky jam.  A few feet away, a newly minted middle-aged couple joined hands for the first time ever beside their forks.  Behind Scully, an aide helped an old woman into the booth.  Two college girls cooed at the counter, full up with things to tell each other.  Time moving forward and backwards, borrowed and stolen and still and running in circles at every table.

“Fine,” Scully repeated and tugged the cuff of his sleeve.  She mouthed the words thank you, bottom lip grazing her teeth.  She did it again, this time forehead collapsing into the center of her face to make that vertical wrinkle she’d had above her nose since she was twenty seven.  

He nodded, reached his foot under the table so that it rested against hers, his rubbery arch warming the sharp edge of her shoe and he pushed the milkshake across the table.  

She laughed and then took a sip.  Relief.

Chapter 24

As a biology major, Scully had sometimes been warned she was signing up for a life of disappointment.  Satisfaction would be fleeting.  Few of them, if any, would make grand discoveries in their careers.  The earth was already round.  The miracle of penicillin had already been witnessed, sprouted hundreds of other little miracles that bore an ever-less-impressive resemblance. A scientist, Scully was told, must learn to love the question, not live for an answer.

William had been a hypothesis for most of these past thirteen years, and though that was sometimes painful, it was familiar.  It was a circumstance Scully had come to accept.  She’d given him up because she’d firmly believed it was better for him.  Conclusions: none.  Control: none.  It was how she’d assumed things would always be.  But now there was an answer. William existed once again. He looked a certain way and sounded a certain way and lived a very certain life and she would always miss him.  This was harder than she’d ever expected or allowed herself to imagine.  The earth is round - think what that had taken for people to get used to it.  

She rationalized things like the thing she was doing by going over this, comparing the unfamiliar emotions associated with her son to the familiar territory of science.  But Stella was no scientist, and she was no poet like Mulder. She was an answers person. And now she was here, involved in Scully’s experiments, and was not particularly happy about it.

They were seated on a cool-slatted autumn park bench, Stella draped in cashmere and reluctance, the chilly peach East Coast air settling on her cheekbones like stains of faint embarrassment.  It had been eight months since their parting ways - eight months of silence. Stella had granted Scully’s request for a visit without knowing specifically what it would entail.  Now she clasped her brown butter leather gloves over a tightly crossed thigh, pulled the cuffs of her sweater down closer to the edge of her gloves to warm her wrists.

Had this once come easier?  The restraint it took to refrain from touch and mentioning the effect of light on the color of her eyes?  An evening they’d spent in a hotel as just-friends came to mind.

“Did you color?” Scully asks, her surgeon-steady hand poised over Stella’s, light pink bottle of Chanel nail polish in place of a scalpel.

“Color… my nails?” Stella asks and blows a stream of air across her other hand.

“No, you know, like, crayons.”

“Oh.  No, not that I remember.”

Scully glances up quickly to make sure of two things – first, that Stella’s not touching her hair, her spaghetti straps, her Scotch, anything that would smudge the half-finished work, and secondly, that she hasn’t overstepped Stella’s bounds by asking questions.

Stella smiles, quick, casual, disappearing.  It’s hard to tell if it ends quickly because there is no reason to force it longer or because some shadow of the past has swallowed it.

“Isn’t that the sweater you let me keep?” Scully asked, eyeing the grey marled drawstrings on the hood.

“Bought myself another one.”

“And here I thought you’d made an ultimate sacrifice.”

“That would be unnecessary when I could just re-purchase it.”

“You could have just asked for it back, it was expensive,” Scully says, feeling the sting.

“And now it has dog hair on it,” Stella continued.

A stranger’s Golden Retriever had brushed up against Scully’s leg and she’d kept him there for a matter of seconds

“It’s barely noticeable.  You and the dog have the same color hair,” Scully said.

“I don’t shed.”

“We all shed.”

“I don’t like dogs.”

“You just pretend not to like them.”

Perhaps this had been a terrible idea.  Perhaps she should have waited for Stella to call first.

“Are you certain he’s coming today?” 

“No, not certain.  I haven’t really established a pattern.”

“That’s good to hear.  Aren’t you freezing in that denim jacket?  What have you got under it?”

“A t-shirt.  I’m fine.”  

“I’m not pretending, I truly dislike dogs.  They’re jumpy and they stink.”

Suddenly, Scully thought of some version of her life not lived, pictured Stella in their home, going stone cold as she brought in this or that mutt home from the pound.

“You’re a cat person, is that what you’re telling me?” she asked.

“I’m not an animal person, I’m a people-person.”

Scully double licked her lips as she waited for a punchline that never came.

“What?” Stella pushed back.  “I’m good with people.”

“You’re good at making people do what you want, that’s not the same thing.”

“You should know.”

Scully looked away, scanned a group of children without guardians - not the right group of children.

“I should have told you this was where we were going, but I thought you’d say no.”

Stella looked at her hard - her hardest countenances were reserved for her kindness.

“I think you know me better than that,” she chided softly.

“Did you swim?”  Scully asks with eager intrigue, that new friendship glee still fresh even after a few years of knowing one another.

“No.  I learned when I was older,” Stella says.

Scully nodded, dug the heels of her hands into the bench as she shuffled her feet - uncrossed and then recrossed.  She tossed her hair to the other shoulder so the wind wouldn’t pin it to her lip balm.  Maybe it would be better if he didn’t show up.

“How many times have you done this?” Stella asked.

“Five or six times.  Seven.”  Eight, nine, if she counted the times he hadn’t showed.

“Long drive coming from your place, isn’t it,” Stella murmured.  

Scully said nothing.  She had never even noticed how long.  She had spent exactly none of those hours considering the moral quandaries involved.  It was only talking to other people about it that even made her aware of them.  Alone, driving here, she wondered about his favorite color, his favorite food, if he could play any instruments.  

“Mulder go with you?”

“Just once.”  

He’d thought it was weird, said it felt wrong.  She’d pretended to agree. 

“What did you do then?” Scully presses.

“Horses.  Everything was my horse.  Riding, being with him, sitting there staring at him leaning on a fence, anything.”

Scully laughs and mumbles something about how very English this is and still Stella’s cuticles stay clean, not a stray stripe. Steady fingers, doctor’s fingers.

“Look at that,” Stella says in a soft, appreciative voice, eyes hot and hard where their hands are occupationally joined. “Even better with your hands than I remember.”

The flirtation is a change of subject, a subtle warning, and Scully licks her lips, doubles back for a second coat of the other hand, prepared to drop the topic of the horse.   But Stella keeps talking.

“My father would take me.”

The father, yes. Somehow always comes back to him, somehow always seems like the best and worst of what Stella remembers.  Scully paints, carefully considering her next question.  The color on Stella’s nails thickens so that it goes from a translucent skin color to a ballet pink that matches Stella’s satin slip camisole top.

Stella had turned slightly to watch a crowd of nearby teenagers approaching the skate park.  She slipped off a glove to scratch her lip with her nail.  This was the kind of thing Stella remembered to do that Scully wouldn’t have - all her leather gloves were marked with pink, red, mauve colored wax.

“How did you and I wind up friends?” Scully asked, eyes on her son, voice going wistful against her better judgment  Sometimes she wondered why they’d had to break up (was that what it was?).  Other times, she wondered how they’d started in the first place.   She caught Stella’s profile for a moment at such a perfect angle that she had to look the opposite direction to catch her breath.  Perhaps eight months had not been enough.  “Two not-people-people from separate parts of the world sitting on a bench together.”

“We almost didn’t.”

“And?”

“And I have irrepressible impulses to fuck beautiful people I know for certain I’ll never see again,” Stella said, pronouncing the F so hard it produced pulp in the air.  The playground moms turned to look.

“Blonde, you said? How’s he blonde?”

“Mulder said to ask you.”

“Idiot,” Stella murmured absently, busy separating the boy out from a crowd, putting him at the crosshairs of her attention. Scully found him at once. She knew his walk by now.  His carriage.  She could spot him a mile away.  She didn’t worry when he didn’t come.  She didn’t think about talking to him or touching him.  It was just this, watching, at a distance, periodically.  Still there.  Still there, watching him like he was an infant sleeping in a cradle rather than an almost adult riding a skateboard.

“There, yes?” Stella said, a voice like a long hooked finger, the drawl so sustained the word could have reached across the Atlantic Ocean.  “That’s him, isn’t it?”  

“Yes,” she hissed to herself without Scully saying anything at all.

He was wearing a hat today, a striped beanie and a pair of Ray-Bans, trying to look cool, Scully thought, but the rest of him was still sloppy and silly, lecturing at his friends about something.  Like his father, she thought, and still she felt no angst, no sadness, only peace.  It was like bird-watching, only it was her son out there in the wild.  And this lanky creature here is known as a young human.

“Not what I expected,” Stella murmured, as though a voice any louder might make him flit away, all the way across the park.  Stella said.  “All you.”

“Why is that unexpected?”

“They say the first child always resembles the father, to keep him from wanting to kill it, eat it or abandon it.”

Scully looked at her knees. 

“That’s not what I meant,” Stella said quickly.

“I know.”

Ten, it had been ten times.

“Were you pretty?  You must have been very pretty.”  Scully is flirting and she knows it but it seems harmless enough.  

“I don’t know.”

Scully gives one of Stella’s fingers a little tug, bats her eyelashes to let Stella know she’s teasing, overdoing it.  She doesn’t know how to pay compliments without turning them into jokes.

“Did people tell you you were pretty, fawn over your golden hair while you relentlessly questioned them?”

It’s Stella’s turn to laugh.

The kids were moving closer, William looking at his phone as he smoldered leaves underfoot, swiveling on the balls of his feet with each step to make the crunch and sizzle.  Who was he texting with?  His mom?  Maybe a girl.  Or boy.  She lost herself in the last of the questions she could dredge up - imagining his turns of phrase, his favorite emoji and soon he was closer than he had ever been, just a few feet away, kicking a ball as he walked.  Scully felt her breath quicken as one of the boys got William’s attention, asked him something.  She had heard his voice only a couple of times, from much further away.

Stella nudged her in the side, drew her attention to the map on her phone.

“Here look,” Stella said.  “Says they’ve a good Caesar salad.  I’m in the mood for that.”

Scully nodded, her ankles brittle as weak stemmed flowers succumbing to first frost. Stella tugged her up from the bench.  She suddenly was very cold and shivered as she wrapped her denim jacket tighter.  She knew Stella’s instincts were right, that it was too strange, too risky for them to just sit there, so close to him.  Don’t turn back, she told herself.  And:

“Don’t turn back,” Stella echoed aloud.

Stella’s hands were in her pockets as they walked, eyes sympathetic but stern. Scully imagined it was how she looked when she brought someone in to identify a body, tell someone their sister had been strangled.

“Mulder’s right about this, you know that.”

Stella’s mention of his name, even in this context of William, or maybe because of it, angered her.  Stella pulled the scarf from her neck and forced it around Scully’s neck.  Loving Stella was no more or less painful than loving someone else, but it was more embarrassing, like loving a ghost or a phantom limb.

“How did you know I asked lots of questions?” 

“Most children do.  And you’re a detective.”

“So are you.”

“Not like you, not a born one.”

“Well you do have a second profession to fall back on.”

“A doctor?”

“A manicurist.”

Scully fake-raps Stella on the wrist and a bit of paint splatters on the crests of her knuckles.

She was grateful that she was not alone, that Stella’s footsteps were falling right beside her own, Stella’s musk-heavy floral scent bedded in the fabric beneath her own chin.  

“I’m glad I got to see him this once,” Stella said. That’s it, William was in the past again, at least for today.

Would she have disliked him as she disliked other children (and dogs?)  She would have been good to him, spoiled him, refused to stop cursing in front of him, probably?

“You and Mulder doing all right?”

“I don’t really want to talk about that.”

“You’ll have to get used to it again at some point.”

“So you’re not going to fight for me,” Scully said, meaning it as a joke, but her voice cracked.

“Fight for you,” Stella repeated dubiously, deciding whether to enter a game or a boxing ring.

Scully was glad they weren’t facing each other now.  She had things she wanted to say.  A fireplace burned somewhere in the neighborhood, the smell of a family gathering around it.

“You sent me back home because of William, didn’t you?  Mulder told you.  That’s why you made me leave you and now I’m home and you don’t think I should see William but you’re not going to try to get me back either. It doesn’t quite track for me.”

She stopped only because her breath ran out.  Stella was silent a moment. Walk, keep walking.  

“I don’t fight for people.”

If not people, then what, Scully wanted to say.  But she bit her lip instead, trying to keep it from trembling as she faced the chill, keeping time as though accidentally, side by side like strangers just off the same bus.  

“You can’t keep doing it.  This was the last time.  All right?”

Scully pursed her lips, shook her head, looked at the sky.  Stella was not going to use her son to change the subject.  

Or were they the same subject?

“You could do worse than Mulder,” Stella said, sharpening the edge on her voice, her weapon of choice, that vicious casualness.  “You love him.  He loves you.  You’re best friends.  He’s very well-endowed, from what I remember.  He can reach things.  Kill bugs.  He found your son for you despite absolute impropriety and deep ethical and legal breaches.”

“Stop,” Scully said, looking away over her other shoulder just to keep from crying.  A cadre of barren trees was ready to march off into winter, leave their dead, once-treasured leaves at their feet.  “Please stop.”

“Fine.”

This was how Stella faced her fears, she knew.  Laughed in the face of murderers, memorized her nightmares, re-read them like fairytales, salivated at the sight of blood, sneered at a plane nose-diving with a slug of Scotch.  

“You aren’t supposed to tell little girls they’re pretty too often,” Stella says with slow, deliberate breaths placed mid-phrase, as though she regrets having to tell anyone this, having to spoil an innocent, unruined worldview where a compliment to a child is merely a compliment, where little girls can be pretty and not suffer for it.

“Why not?”

“Because it makes them think they’re nothing else.”

“Mm,” Scully says and caps the polish.  Stella sits still as stone, hands out in front of her on the magazine, watching the polish dry with more patience than Scully has ever seen her muster.

“Sometimes you just have to let a person go,” Stella said as a boy - not her boy - on a skateboard sailed by.

“Which of you are you talking about now?”

Yes, the same subject.

Stella stopped abruptly, took Scully’s chin in one hand.  Rough enough that Scully might have objected except that it was stopping the incessant spinning she’d felt since they got up from the bench.

“I can’t do what Mulder can do, Dana.  And Mulder can’t do what I’m doing right now, and I don’t live here, so you need to let me say this right fucking now and tell me you hear me.”

Scully tightened her jaw stubbornly.  She felt small but safe here in Stella’s one hand.

“This is the last time you see him until he’s eighteen and you can ask.  Or you’ll regret it.”

Scully nodded, gulped away the tears in her throat, but they were tears of embarrassment, not sadness.  Stella’s grip loosened but did not release her.

“Tell me you hear me.”

Stella finally dropped her hand and held Scully’s.  The skin was bare.  Where was her glove?

“I wish I could have known you then,” Scully says, replacing the fancy second square cap over the little ridged round one.

“Take this,” Stella said and handed her one glove.

“Why?”

Scully heard the footsteps before she saw him and she saw the slightly sad, slightly satisfied smile in Stella’s eyes.  It could be any of them, Scully told herself, any of those kids.

“Excuse me!  Lady!”  

But it was him.  Stella nodded for her to turn.

“This yours?” he asked.

He held the abandoned glove out at arm’s length and Scully choked the sob in her throat.  Despite Stella’s impression, he looked just like Mulder the first day she met him.  First day of school science lab boy, nerdy and needy, sanguine and sweet and unaware of his charms, willing to cut open anything you didn’t want to touch even if he had to hold his breath to do it himself.

“Yes, yeah that’s mine,” she forced herself to say finally, knowing that once she did it would be over.  Her pause made him laugh for some reason.  When she stuck her hand out to take the glove, she must have still looked dazed, lame, because he frowned at her as though she’d made a silly mistake, then stuck his tongue between his molars and held her wrist with one hand, pretending to struggle to put it on her like a toddler.  She laughed, counting the seconds until she could collapse.  She’d have to make it out of the park, clear the area, she knew.

“Thanks,” she said and he nodded, licked his lips, and yes that was all her, turning them chapped to the wind and jogging off to meet his friends, a thirteen year old interrupting his afternoon to return a single glove to two middle aged women he’d never seen before.

Stella immediately took her arm, keeping the pace steady but consistent.  Scully kept up but would not stop looking until Stella looked back.

“What if he didn’t return it?” Scully managed to whisper.

“Why?” Stella asks.

As in why would anyone want to have known a four- and six- and eight-year-old girl like her, freckle faced and quiet eyed, brushing a horse’s back as she stands on a stool, proud and kind and a little strange, inconceivably wise beyond her years.

“Because,” Scully says and picks up Stella’s hands, squeezes her palms between thumb and middle fingers. “Then I could have told you you were everything.”

“I was willing to lose a glove today.”

Chapter 25

He realized he’d left the door unlocked by the way the early November candy corn breeze whistled through the first grade teeth of the patched screen door, winter dragging autumn out by its ankles.  The kitchen was as clean as it had been when Scully lived there, back when she’d tidy it every night before bed, caring for it like she cared for her teeth or her skin.  

It had taken him some time to figure out how to do this.  Time plus a therapist, two bottles of pills on the bathroom counter, and experiments with various citrusy smelling liquids in spray bottles.  Toxic, non-toxic, lemon-mint, gingerberry, when to hit the hard stuff - bleach, served neat.  Certain things like mental health and spotless surfaces had always been Scully’s area of expertise, but in her absence, he’d learned about both.

He’d done this often over the years, sat with William’s baby picture, forearms resting on the kitchen table, staring at it the way most people had learned during those years to stare at their tablets and phones.  He only ever did it alone - waited for Scully to leave and go home, which she always did.  When she lived here, he’d had to wait for her to go to sleep.  He had never told her it wasn’t all research and computer screens wrestling him from their bed.  

The photo paper was pliant from age and attention and it took only ten minutes or so for it to warm between his fingertips so thoroughly that he worried the colors would come off on his fingers, that baby William would disappear from prosperity into the temporariness of his skin.  He used to think of old world boy-things - model rockets and baseball caps, the stuff of fifties sitcoms and Norman Rockwell.  He used to think you belong here.

He used to wonder if William would look at him the same way Scully did when she was thinking aloud, the little line forming between her eyebrows, the squint, the lips tightening in distaste and restraint, or if William was more like him, a dreamer and a rambler.  He knew himself.  He knew Scully.  That William possible, knowable. But now he was a third thing - himself.

The screen door hinge cracked and smacked behind him.  He’d recently tightened the screws and she wasn’t used to its newfound snap.  Stella must have gone back to London.  He had not asked for dates and times - had never done that, not even when they were together.  He’d always had plenty to keep himself busy while Stella was in town.  He more often had trouble stopping that busyness when Stella had gone.  He always made Scully re-announce her presence. “Just me, Mulder.” “I know.”  I can tell by the way the gravel crunches under your tires, can tell by the tone of the wooden moan in the porch floorboards, by the way you breathe on the other side of a weight-bearing wall.  You belong here. “So clean,” she marvelled quietly, as she often did when she stopped by these days to say hello or drop off some pizza or check on him, he knew that’s what it was.  He wondered if someday it would sound like superiority.  He wondered if he’d ever learn to take her for granted again, just a little bit, just enough to relax.

“How’s Stella?” he asked, and considered shuffling the photo out of view as he normally would, but for some reason, this time, he did not.

“She’s good, I think.  You know, Stella doesn’t say much.”  

She dropped William’s folder on the table. She’d had possession of it since the diner. Now she leaned on the back of the chair over him, her fingers snuggling between the wood and his back as she saw the baby picture.  She petted his hair from behind, rested her chin on his head so that her voice came out funny.  He wondered how long she’d been watching from the door.

“I didn’t know you still had that,” she said and her voice sounded strangled by the lump in her throat.

Someday something like that might feel like a vote of underconfidence, a dig… he wished for that someday to come.

“I don’t know what’s harder, having information about him, or when we had nothing,” she said.

“I was just thinking that.”

“Were you?”  

For years, they’d resisted this.  Done everything else together while they mourned the loss of their family in private.  Like they’d had separate roles in that crime.  Like they weren’t serving the same sentence.  Just minutes ago, he’d been making plans to keep doing it forever.  Why?

“I spoke to him,” she said.  “Heard his voice.”

He tried not to look alarmed.

“No, not like that, not about anything.  Just accidentally left something behind and he… he was… good, he’s good.”

“Of course he is, Scully.  He’s yours.”

She came around the chair and leaned her behind against the edge of the table, half-smiled.

“Maybe it’ll be better if we put them away,” she said.  “For us.  And for him.”

Someday this might sound like she was couching her own self-correction in a criticism but tonight it sounded like thank Christ, Stella had talked sense into her.

“I think you’re right.”

“Regular people with normal jobs wouldn’t have even gotten this much.”

“No.”

“But I’m glad you did, Mulder,” she said and this would always mean what it meant tonight.

She picked up the photos - the baby one and the new ones, stared at them as she shuffled to the drawer next to the fridge and laid them in there with their love notes, blank birthday cards, Scotch tape.  Sometimes junk drawers weren’t for junk, they were just for the things you didn’t know what to do with.

She hesitated, then pushed it shut, and then, leaning back against it, hands still behind her on the pull, she looked at him, really looked at him.  Sweet and sexy and yes, a little sad.  Her lips shined, caught the glow of the single source of light in the room over his head.  He held his breath.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me,” she demanded softly.  “That you were sad about it?”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

He waved her over and she came, held his hands like the holster of a carousel horse.  In her eyes, shades of blue spun as she tried not to cry.

“Hard to say goodbye to him all over again.”

He nodded, swallowed, and put one arm around her hips.

“But this time I’m here.”

Her belly shook at his ear, though he heard nothing.  He kissed the hem of her sweater, leaned his chin into the dip of her navel.  She wiped her cheeks dry and then took his face in one wet salted palm, bent to kiss him on the mouth.

Her hands crept around his throat, thumbs at his Adam’s apple.  The room stopped smelling “clean” and smelled instead like her, like the perfume she’d been wearing since the day she first walked into his office, something he had never heard the name of, never heard her mention having to replace.   She was only good at keeping the silliest secrets. He put his hands around the trunk of her right thigh and tugged her towards him.  More need than want is what it was up until then. 

But now her body swayed toward him and she climbed into his lap in her sweatpants.  It had been years and her lips dripped with salt.  She tasted like love and sadness and the future.  He was hard for her, hell, hard for all of it.

“I’m here this time,” he said, pulling his mouth just far enough from hers to speak, letting her tongue catch the chap of his lips.  “I’ll always be here.”

She stopped then and something passed behind her eyes, a shift of color behind blue-tinted glass, a sheet in the wind, a wave of blonde hair, a silk shirt.  Would she think of Stella whenever they kissed, when he made love to her on this table?  Would he ever not wonder?  

“Always is a long time,” she said without hiding the hint of mournfulness, of missing something, and he nodded.

“I didn’t say she’d be gone.  I just said I’ll be here.”

She frowned, breath quickening even as her mind slowed.

“Mulder?”

“We’re too old to give up things we love,” he said and meant it. Who cared what she thought of when he kissed her?

She unzipped her sweatshirt, pushed it back off her shoulders.

He placed a kiss on her neck, stripped her naked from the waist up.  She moved his lips back to her own and dropped her weight deeper into the cusp of his pelvis.  With their noses pushed together and her shoulder blades clipped toward one another over the table, she breathed into his mouth.

“God, I missed you,” he said.

“Fuck me, Mulder.”  

Her hair frizzed in his fist as she pulled her hamstrings tight atop his quadriceps.  The grace of youth was gone but it was replaced with something better.  This is what age looked like.  This is what fixed mistakes looked like.

One hand on her lower back, hooked into the back of her pants, the tag silky between his thumb and her skin, he pulled her closer and tighter, sucking her into his mouth, savoring her like a sublingual pill, like he was waiting for her to melt under his tongue and be absorbed into his blood.  

She arched and stretched, placing herself over him with such anatomical precision that he might as well be inside her rather than on either side of four layers of clothes.  Her body was hot and impatient against his belly as his fingers slipped into her pants and under her thigh, past the cotton seam of her underwear.  She hummed in his ear, fit her body more closely over his hand.  

He lifted her at the waist, laid her back on the table, pulled her bottoms off in a swift but clumsy motion.  He leaned over to kiss her cheeks, her neck, her chest. She bent a knee and brought the top of her foot to brush his cock through his pants, rubbed the sharp crest of her instep against him until it hurt.

“Fuck me, Mulder,” she said again, the solid edges of her voice absorbed by the wood at her back.  She squeezed his arms. “Easy, baby,” he said and as he entered her, her eyes watered and a tear rolled out onto the table, crystal clear.  She’d come over for dinner and television, sweatpants and chopsticks, but he had trapped her with his clean surfaces and exposed wounds.   Her body shuddered, shoulders convulsing, shrugging off the past, making herself new for him.  “So tight.  How are you still so tight for me?”

She grinned wickedly.

“She only has so many fingers.”

And he laughed, bit her neck as he fucked her slowly.

They’d made their baby just like this, in a bed rather than on a table, but just like this, with this much love and intent.  He’d known right away that it had worked, known just looking at her collapsed on his torso. “Oh my God,” she whispered as the edge of the table met the back of her knees.  She pinched his t-shirt to her in both fists, then slammed one hand down hard next to her hip.  He moved his hands from table to body, alternatingly bracing his weight and cupping her breasts, aligning her hips and brushing her lips, fucking her until she white knuckled the slab he used to eat his depressed dinners on.

She pulled herself up against him, gripped his neck and pushed her feet against the seat of the chair behind him for leverage.  Sometimes it upset him how little he had to do to make her come.  Sometimes but not now.

“Look at me like you used to,” she said and he spun around to sit on the table, let her put her knees down on either side of him.   “Look at me so I can make you come.”

They did it together, like they did most things, their work and their driving and their arguing and their meals and now their goodbyes to their son.  Soft staccatoed moans and her pelvic muscles squeezed and tugged him and he peeled the cheeks of her ass so that she’d take him deeper and then the rhythm of their bodies broke like a fever, madness taking over, breath tangling, toxic and medicinal at once, words all nonsense and undictionaried.   If she was thinking of Stella too, that didn’t matter, that was not a bad thing, because nothing associated with this could be bad.

Scully looked up from the armchair and felt her chin drop when she heard the typewriter click of Stella’s shoes on the staircase.  Stella descended slowly, dangling pauses like pronouncements, each patent leather heel hovering over its next step like she expected it to rise up and meet her rather than the other way around.  Blouse nipped at the sides pinned by seams to her body like a cloud to the sky.  Blacks so deep the gold seemed to swim in it, whites so new they shaded her face pink.  On her, a police uniform was a fantasy of authority and sex so pure that it seemed more like a costume than a mandate.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Scully said, forgetting both her secret and sucking of her bleeding nail a moment.

“Bring that finger over here and let me do that for you.”

If they’d had more time, it would have been a good idea, actually, a way of getting through it...  Run her fingers over Stella’s body between sentences, feel her out like a bit of Braille on smooth, sure stone, fingers placed here and there along her pulse, her spine, her hips, and yes one in her mouth.  Stella had an aptitude for nuance in physical contact that she lacked in conversation.  Would it have been exploitative to talk to her that way?  Or an act of kindness?

“That’s your real uniform?”

“I can’t tell if you’re judging or leering,” Stella said.  “If it’s the latter, please make that clear and let’s skip the party.”

“You keep calling it that. Party.”

“Because it is a party, darling.  We’re having alcohol and we put on high heels.”

“You partake of both those things every day.”

“You don’t.”

Scully smiled despite herself.  Stella was square-shouldered in the foyer mirror now, one lazy eye on Scully in the reflection as she fastened the little black tie around her neck and tossed her hair. As she did so, the blonde picked up the shine of the embroidery on her collar, a crystal casting the sun for a rainbow.

“Are they all going to look like this?  Your colleagues?  Underlings?”

“Why?” Stella teased.  “Looking for a replacement?”

“No, of course not.”  

Had that come off as overly serious? Defensive?  Later, in a childish game of what-if, woulda-coulda-shoulda, Scully would wonder how much sooner Stella would have read her, caught her out, had she not been in an unusual state of self-surveillance, so vigilant of her own vulnerability with the “party” that she could miss something to obvious.

“I have them tailored,” Stella said with a sheepish so-what of a smile.  

She slow-stalked the kitchen like a jungle cat, stroked the cylinder of a water glass and placed long, inexplicable glances on various inanimate objects in the room, as though deciding whether to consume or spare each thing.  Then she sipped her water, made tiger stripes on the rim with her lipstick.   There was silence to fill here, but Scully’s mouth had gone dry.

Finally, Stella reached for her jacket and slipped into it as though she’d been recently painted and was trying not to smudge herself.  

“How should I introduce you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“People are likely to assume we’re fucking no matter what I say.”

“Only you assume that about everyone.”

Stella grinned into her last gulp of water and murmured, letting it echo and bubble as she slurped, pausing to swallow in the middle of her phrase.

“This is for your benefit.  I’m making sure you’re prepared.  People will whisper.”

“I’ve been whispered about that way at work my whole life.”

“There are worse things to have whispered by colleagues.”

“I know.  I’ve had those whispered too.”

Stella was unsatisfied.  She didn’t want jokes, she wanted confirmation that this evening would come off without a hitch.  It was not for Scully’s benefit, not really, and that was okay.  Scully spoke as though by rote, repeating her lessons.

“I am prepared for them to assume we’re a couple.”

Stella circled her and collected a small clutch purse she’d left open on the barstool, nudged Scully’s jeweled earlobe with her nose.  She tucked her phone into the bag, a bed of tissues and lip gloss, and then held it under her armpit as she put both arms around Scully’s waist.  Her face now rested on Scully’s shoulder, the carefully-applied layer of cosmetics wafting like spring flowers sealed in wax, a semi-edible decoration atop a birthday cake.  For a moment it seemed unlikely that anything else scheduled for this evening could hold as much weight as that shoulder did.

“I didn’t say couple.  I said fucking.”  Her jaw had dug itself a permanent residence in the posterior delta of Scully’s clavicle.  Scully worried for a moment that the makeup would come off on the sweater, but it was Stella’s sweater after all.  “Be a lamb and say it for me.”

“Fucking,” Scully murmured.

“Mm.”

Scully turned to face her.  Her neck spasmed where Stella’s chin had left a dent.

“You look nice in my things,” Stella said.  

Scully nodded, the guilt traveling like a heart attack up her arm from where Stella held her wrist.  She’d always been shit at accepting compliments, so Stella didn’t notice.

“You look perfect,” she countered.

“Thank you,” Stella said with the quiet, simple grace Scully could never seem to muster.

Scully braced herself.  She had Stella’s attention, the intimacy of a couple’s last moment alone before a party.  She battled the sickening rush of temptation as she considered what to do with it, whether to speak or keep Stella close, to stay here on the safe side of things a little bit longer.

“Come, darling.”

She took Stella’s arm and followed her out.

*

It had been a long time since Scully had observed Stella in a professional setting and she was mesmerized during the ceremony by her focus.  Hands and limbs kept to herself throughout the ceremony, occasionally lifting her chin, a sort of reverse nod of approval at something a speaker said or did.  Scully wondered if Stella’s mind was wandering, if she let herself think of the fact that she could have been one of these names, if she felt guilty or lucky or strange for having narrowly escaped a place among these unfortunate honorees.  

At the end, everyone was directed to the back of the room where tea lights sprouted on pale blue cloths tossed over coin-sized tables.  The room let out a collective sigh of relief, moving en masse toward the promise of small talk and wine.  Cocktail waiters emerged from swinging doors like crumple-vested spiders, drawing invisible webs around arbitrary clusters of people.  The mourners took part at once, moving easily between grief and relief.  Everyone knew their ghosts would be holding their coats for them at the door.  It was a party, like Stella said.

And for Stella, it was turning out to be a pretty good one.  Her posture was already soft with victory.  She’d appeared here in one piece, as herself, had reclaimed her reputation as reliable and invincible.  Scully’s ankles wobbled in her shoes as she thought of the car ride home, the living room where they’d step out of their shoes and wiggle sore toes, of how she’d begin to spoil a perfect night.  She wondered how many drinks Stella would have in her by the time Scully finally said what she needed to say.  One or two and it wouldn’t make a difference, three-plus meant a sloppier tongue and quicker wrists, the sum-total effect of which was generally more auspicious at the end of a night together.

Stella took two glasses of white from one of the passing trays and handed one to her date.

“Chardonnay,” she grumbled with the pout of an adult equally well-versed in self-abuse and self-care. “I spoke to them about this last year.”

Scully laughed.  

“People are grieving for Christ’s sake,” Stella went on.

Scully sucked her stomach in on a deep breath and Stella noticed, misread it as self-consciousness.  Scully let her, sins of omission multiplying like the empty plastic cups on the tables.   Stella leaned in, put her lips against Scully’s ear and Scully wondered if there would be marks on her skin like the water glass, little bands of metallic pink across the cartilage.

“Do you want to go?  We can go,” Stella prompted.  She fiddled with the knot of the bow on Scully’s wrap sweater and freshened it in a shorter amount of time than it had taken Scully to do in the first place.

“No, no.  I just… think I should have worn my own clothes,” Scully said because she needed something true to complain about.  “Or borrowed a uniform.”

“No one would have known the difference, two thirds of these people are idiots.”

“They seem nice.”

“That’s the third I’m willing to talk to.  You could have had mine.  Uniform, I mean.  I hate wearing it,” Stella said, righting herself beside Scully.

“You do?  Even after all that nipping and tucking?”

Stella’s face darkened as it often did when her memory retraced certain steps.  Scully felt obtuse for needing time to understand the tailoring – it was an act of control, not vanity.  

“It reminds me of school.”

This was always how getting to know Stella had been, like picking up items on a scavenger hunt: school names here, siblings there.  There had been times she was tempted to sit Stella down and ask questions for three hours, take notes and turn on a journalist’s tape recorder to get it all down.  It had never much bothered her much; she’d told herself she knew all she needed to know.  How to read Stella’s temperature from across the room, hear the switch flip from silent-at-peace to silent-in-turmoil with music blaring and a bar full of people.  That Stella likes to be touched, but only by people she trusts, that she likes innocent-faced men and women with purpose, that she brushes her teeth in the shower and leaves cabinet doors slightly ajar, that she likes to dance but only when she asks, that she washes her face wearing a red polka dotted headband sometimes.  She knew she could call her for any reason, at any time, and not be judged or turned away, and that when Stella didn’t answer a question, it meant Scully would find it out eventually, out of nowhere, in some other empty space between two moments, when Stella was finally ready to share it, and then Scully might wish she’d never asked it at all.  But she didn’t know how Stella was going to react to what she had to tell her tonight, and that made her feel like all that knowledge was for nought.

They were moving now, Stella in front and Scully in tow, sailing the crowd shoulder to shoulder, Stella billowing in and out of conversations with impressive ease.  Her fingers trailed behind when she walked, or at her side when she stopped, left an infrared wake for Scully to follow.  Scully felt freer than she was used to feeling as someone’s date.  And feeling good while she deceived Stella was unsettling.  Stella’s trust was a limited fund, one she was using up with every moment she held her tongue.

Stella had stopped now, but the crowd continued to move, and Scully had the sensation of standing still on a boat.  She felt her temperature rise and pushed up the sleeves of the sweater.  Her forearms turned pink from the friction.   She couldn’t do it anymore.

“Stella, I have to-”

Stella turned, pinched a crepey pastry off on hors d’oeuvre tray and supported it with a cocktail napkin on its way to Scully’s mouth. Scully lowered her eyes but obediently nibbled, licked the flakes off her lips.

“Stella-”

But she needed time to swallow and in that time...

“Oh.  You remember Ferrington?”

Of course.  The girl who had “door-stepped” Stella with the soup.  She’d had to twist Stella’s arm into a thank-you phone call, but Dani hadn’t picked up anyway and the voicemail got it.  Dani had a date tonight, presumably a girlfriend and Scully wondered whether Dani had assumed the same about her - presumably girlfriend.

“Hello again,” Dani said with a gracious first nod to Scully.  “Dana, right?”

“Hi there.  How are you?” Scully said, trying not to sound angry.  None of her worries was Dani’s fault.  “I don’t know if Stella told you but I loved your soup.”

Dani beamed and the conversation split, Stella taking on small-talk with the girlfriend and Scully entertaining Dani.

“Still here in town?” Dani asked.

“Yes, still here,” Scully said and tucked her hair behind her ear.  

A warm hand on her lower back, one of Stella’s fingers segregating two lines of cashmere ribbon around her waist, a gesture of concern, of care, of – Scully put her hands to her cheeks to cool them - possession.

“Warm in here, is it?” Dani said to Scully, head cocked in empathy.  Her face must be the color of an apple.  “So, how long before you go back?”

“May only be a few more days,” Scully said under her breath, wiping her brow.  She didn’t think Stella would hear and she didn’t want to lie - had not actively lied yet about it.

But of course, the room went silent the minute she mumbled it and her voice seemed so loud it was as though someone had inadvertently passed a microphone under her lips.  Stella dropped her hand from Scully’s back, turned with such eerie cool that for a second Scully wondered if Stella had known all along, had eavesdropped on the phone call last week.  She searched Stella’s face for some emotion - forgiveness or fury, anything other than the punishing granite wall of indifference suddenly being erected inches from her nose, limiting her view of all else.

Scully glanced at Dani, swallowed, squeezed her lips together before she spoke.

“I - I got a call from my work and I can’t extend the leave any longer so--”

“Always… hard to see a... friend go after a long visit,” Dani said, turning to Stella, unsure what exactly was going on but perceptive enough to know she should take Stella’s side.

“Mm.  Excuse me, this wine is abominable,” Stella said.  “I’m going to talk them into coughing up some liquor.  Anyone?”

And Scully had no choice but to let her go.

*

Scully found Stella ten minutes later in a screen-porch-faded bathroom with chipping yellow paint.  Familiar in the manner of a fever dream, more unwanted and disorienting for each recognizable reference point - a pallid iteration of the psych ward restroom in which Stella’s consolation had begun their friendship.  Stella leaned on the sink with fighters’ fists, blister red with white spots at the bones, staring with chilling remove into the ceramic basin.  Scully’s instinctive relief at not finding Stella in hysterics quickly transformed into the panic of finding this instead.  She glanced uneasily at the walls, as though to make sure they wouldn’t close in on her.

“Stella -”

How many times had she said her name like that tonight, trying to get to more?  So many it was starting to seem detached from Stella the person.  A word became meaningless and foreign if you said it enough.

Stella held a hand up and caught her eye in the mirror a moment and then a toilet flushed.  A waitress emerged from one of the stalls and embarrassed, fumbled through the hand-washing process.  Stella’s stare was unforgiving and lasted the duration, and Scully waited, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to absorb the awkwardness with micro movements.  

“Lock the door,” Stella said when they were finally alone.

“What if someone has to --”

“I said lock it.”

“I’m sorry,” Scully said as she flipped the bolt.  It was heavy and hard to push, left a line in the middle of the pad of her finger.  The irritation she was beginning to feel in reaction to Stella’s behavior was something of a relief.  Anything to avoid the self-reproach she’d been bearing up under all day.  “It’s not like I want to leave you.  But I have to unless I’m going to, I don’t know, move here.”

Stella’s glare set into her like a machete, cleaved her right between the eyes.

“You think I care if you go?  I care that you just made me look like an idiot.”

“You don’t care if I go?”

“Don’t be a cliché.”

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t want to stay but you don’t want me to let you go either.”

“I just… I didn’t know where this was going… and my life…”

“It’s not going anywhere,” Stella snapped.  

Scully licked her lower lip and swallowed, trying not to cry.

“Well, that’s what I assumed.”

“I sound angry but I don’t mean to.  I don’t like surprises.”

Observing Stella’s process of calming herself was one of the more disconcerting experiences Scully could summon to mind, on par with the mid-ride plateau of a rollercoaster, helpless between two loops, listening to the engine click and collect the momentum it needed to throw you off the next drop.

“I don’t want anything to go anywhere,” Stella said, gaze softening but not warming, falling like sleet into the sink.  Scully followed it, gripped the drain with her eyes before it could swallow her.

“You haven’t been happy having me here?”

“That’s the present.  You’re talking about the future.”

“You know, this is a version of the same conversation we had fifteen years ago after the first night we spent alone together,” Scully said.

“Maybe we’re fools for needing to have it again.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have had it in the first place.”

Stella scoffed.

“Come on, Dana.  What?  And just been together?”  She looked at Scully.  “You wouldn’t have had any of your life with Mulder, your child.”

“I lost them anyway.”

One of Stella’s eyes flinched and she licked her bottom lip, swallowed whatever bit of gloss she’d picked up there.  She turned back to the sink.

“Well, I guess I make for a decent consolation prize.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Scully said, “and you know it.”  She hated the way her voice sounded, wounded and will-less.

“You speak to Mulder recently?” Stella asked and ran her tongue in front of her teeth.

“Yes.  Why?”

Stella tossed off a look that landed like a punch in the chest.

“Don’t you dare,” Stella said and her voice rattled like a stick.

“Dare what?” Scully finally asked.  But Stella didn’t answer because she knew Scully knew.  Don’t you dare pretend he’s beside the point.

Cold air suddenly puffed from the vent overhead.  Scully crossed her arms and shivered with the recognition that she was taking part in an overreaction.  She had made many fights in her life worse this way, by trying to manufacture the end before it had lived its natural course, diminishing a drama before it had played out its denouement.

“Listen.  I don’t know what you want from me,” she said.  “What was my alternative here?”

“Bring it up sooner.”

“And then what?  You would’ve said stay, quit your job, move to England, and we’ll go to a party next week?  You’ve had this thing on your mind for days.  It would’ve ruined it.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

Scully took a step closer and Stella stepped back.

“Let’s talk about this later when we’re calm,” Scully said, reaching for her.  Stella swatted her arms back out of reach.

“Let me be,” she said.  

Scully looked at her feet as Stella edged past her, avoiding her like the pit of a natural disaster.  The thought of staying in this bathroom one second longer than necessary was unbearable.  The thought of not following Stella out made her feel lost and scared and alone in a foreign country in a way she had not felt switching trains on complicated tube lines, not felt getting lost on runs around ungridded alleyways of gory murderers.  

She spent the hour rationalizing and emerged hungry and thirsty and calm, her tailbone sore from the plastic toilet bowl cover seat.  This would blow over quickly.  She and Stella had been through too much.  There were advantages to spending most of your life arguing every day with someone you loved.  You knew what to do with an hour alone in the bathroom.  (Not that Mulder had ever given her an hour alone in her life.)

The lights had gone darker, the crowd had grown louder and there was music she didn’t recall noticing before.  She searched the room for Stella’s golden head, eager to make things right.  The bar came into view as the crowd parted and Scully stopped short, felt a few bodies stiffen and pile behind her.  A couple drops of something cold splashed her calves.  People doled apologies or sought them but she didn’t care.  

There was Stella on a high stool with an arched back and a strategically crossed leg, talking to, or rather, listening to, or rather, pretending to listen to a male officer in his thirties.  Bored and sloping as the moon, leaning on one elbow over the bar, forearm waving its half empty glass of Scotch like a loose clock hand.  The shoe on her crossed foot clucked on and off her heel and she was absent behind the eyes, already living in an event to come within hours, the furthest future she was capable of embracing.

Scully threw a sharp glance down at the floor, then moved forward, thinking of the courage of crime scenes past.  She tried to imagine the comfort of a flashlight in hand, a gun in its holster, a walkie promising backup.  

Stella looked at her as though she were one of the cocktail waitresses carrying substandard table wine and she might as well have murdered her.

“Hi there,” the idiot man said, chipper, swingy, a lucky guy having a lucky night, and Scully allowed herself to hate him deeply and irrationally as she waited for Stella to introduce her.  Nothing.

“I’m going to head back to the flat,” Scully said at last.

“I’ll be there eventually.  Few more things I want to do here.”

He beamed with pride, the man did, in the periphery of Scully’s view; he was that thing she meant to do!  But Stella ignored him for the time being, fixed Scully with a hunter’s stare, eyes empty as the viewfinder of a rifle, Scully filling in the space between the crosshairs, fur up on the back of her neck under a string of pearls.  She felt Stella’s focus sharpen, watched her trigger finger wiggle around her glass.  And Scully turned while she could still get out alive, bolted through the human foliage of widows and revelers toward the exit.

*

There was comfort in the predictability of it: Stella going home with some random man to escape reality.  Scully managed mostly to put the details of it out of her mind and wondered instead what her role here was, what Stella would be expecting of her.   This, she thought, was as apt a description of love as any – wanting to give another person exactly what they expected of you, even when they weren’t looking, even when you were furious with them.

She’d left her shoes in two different spots on the staircase, clothes in three distinct heaps.  She’d hidden her phone from herself, hoped she’d had enough to drink on an empty stomach to fall for it, then cried and taken a shower and sipped wine from an open bottle.  Not knowing what else to do, she’d resorted to tackling the contents of two junk drawers and a spice rack on the kitchen floor.  She’d done this with Mulder sometimes too, reorganized his (overbearing, overwhelming) spaces in their home and office.  It made her feel closer to him then, and to Stella now, trying to safe-crack her logic from the inside out, determine why one thing was on the same shelf as the next, or why condoms were in the kitchen at all (though not wonder too hard).  It took a great deal of energy she would have otherwise used on self-pity to frame things the way Stella would, distinguish complex system from misplaced item; everything with Stella fell into one or the other of those categories.  

It wasn’t until she heard the thick poplin-gabardine swish of uniform sleeves in the foyer that she realized that Stella might view the innards of cabinets splayed across the hard grey floor as a provocation.  But it was too late to undo what she’d already undone, so she kept her eyes on the bottle of cardamom, weeded out a yellow potato chip clip, thought of Stella wiping her hands on a pair of overpriced sweatpants while closing a bag of kettle chips she’d stash in a corner behind the red wine.  

She slumped a little deeper, expecting any minute to hear strident stilettos making their way to the fridge, to feel Stella’s triumphant glare on the back of her head.  She braced herself for the smells, the sights, the evidence of spite-sex.  It was Stella’s right to go home with whomever she wanted, with or without the impetus of a fight.  Scully had never asked her for any sort of exclusivity.  She was good at not asking people for what they couldn’t give, but bad at accepting the fact that they didn’t offer it up.  

But there was something other than gloating triumph going on.  Stella stood still under the arc that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house.  A truce had arrived, or at least, it was within Scully’s power to provide one.  Scully picked up a plastic container of rainbow nonpareils and shook them weakly.

“What are these for?”

“Ice cream.  Fairy bread.”

A smile ached across Scully’s teeth.

“Fairy bread?  How am I supposed to keep arguing with you when you say stuff like that?”

“I’m sorry.  It was rude to send you off that way,” Stella said.  What she didn’t say was for fucking somebody else.

Scully put one hand on the floor and pressed herself up to stand.  The eye makeup hadn’t budged, of course, and the lips were red from rubbing rather than taupe from painting, but the cheeks were splotchy, and the bottom rims of her eyes sagged until the red part showed, as though they’d been stretched beyond repair.  She wondered where Stella could have cried.  Surely not in the presence of that strange man.  In his bathroom?  The cab ride home?  On some street corner between here and there, hiding in a shadow with her palms pressed into a row of brick?  Her heart sizzled like an antacid dropped into a glass - sadness competing with jealousy and anger.  Mulder had never tried or tested her in this particular way.  The first time they’d had sex, or maybe sooner, she got his undying faithfulness in return.  She’d only ever lost him to ideas, thoughts, to himself, never to another person.

The uniform skirt was wrinkled at the hips and the blouse sagged so that it was almost unrecognizable from this afternoon.  Scully felt a twinge of sadness remembering how the day had started; stiff fabric and affectionate glances, innuendo in a foyer mirror.  

“I didn’t expect you to be sorry,” Scully said.

“That’s two of us then.”

Scully rolled a row of unsharpened pencils that were waiting to be organized on the counter.  They seemed so clean and useful absent the frustrated chewing marks she was accustomed to finding in her and Mulder’s office.   Stella found other things to sink her teeth into.

“It’s your prerogative,” Scully said.

“I know that.  But you’re standing there looking at me like that and it makes me want to die.”

Something in the phrase or in Stella’s voice resembled a distant generic concept of couplehood.  This was how most people behaved.  They belonged somewhere at a certain time of night, they were sorry when they weren’t in that place, other people who expected them in that place got jealous, everyone felt guilty.  That was what a relationship was… wasn’t it?  How could she have gotten to this point in her life and not known?

“Maybe we could go to therapy,” she said and almost laughed at herself.  Somewhere she’d heard people talk like this.  “You know, figure it out.”

Stella looked at her with something like gentle reproach.  Or sympathy.  Or pity.  Or apology.  Whatever it was, it was not cruelty.  

“But you’ve come so far,” Scully said, turning her face away, giving in, letting it fold like a pile of shirts on her shoulder.

“Please don’t ask me to come any further.”

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

 He took an umbrella from the corner behind the door and popped it up over his head as he stepped outside and sat beside Scully on the stoop.  Stella’s perfume wafted up under the dome of shadowy navy blue fabric and he wondered if she spritzed her things with the overtly feminine bottles he saw in the bathroom, or if it was an accident they smelled like this, a sin of proximity.  Surely, Stella had changed perfumes over the years - even the current bottles she had came round and angular, jagged, prismatic, choked with ribbons round the neck, so many for one person - but somehow the scent of her had always seemed constant.  Dark, floral, and vaguely spiced.  In his mind, the umbrella today smelled exactly like the scarf he’d run through his fingers the week he first met her.

 As he stepped outside, Scully bit a straggling piece of dry skin off her upper lip, body pitched forward over splayed knees, hair clumping and separating in ways he knew would drive her crazy if she had the luxury of being driven crazy by such things.

 “She’s just blowing off steam somewhere,” he said.  “I’m sure.”  Tiny drops of water ticked the plastic protecting them from the most fragile precipitation available to planet Earth.

 Scully nodded, her nose pink and wet around the nostrils.  Cried-off mascara tire-marked her cheekbones.

 “I know she’s a person who… she can be a little reckless.  But she knows how to handle herself,” he further surmised.  

 She looked at him with heavily hooded eyes.

 “Do we know how to handle ourselves?”

 No.  They’d been mishandling themselves, and each other, for years.   Mulder had sometimes looked at other couples in their comfortable domestic routines, people he passed picking up grated cheese in the grocery store or arguing over who should drive home, with pity - they could not possibly love each other as much and as deeply as he and Scully did, no one could.  But maybe with less love, he thought now, they’d have messed it up less.

 “We know how she is,” Scully continued.  “We know how she is about… about sex.  And do you know what happened?  The Spector guy?”

 “I do.”  He’d googled after seeing Stella’s bruises.

 Scully’s voice started to waver so that he could hear the love wheezing in and out of her heart, escaping the narrow strangle of her throat.   “How could we just... use her like that?”

 Mulder tried to rewind by a few hours to the moment he’d watched Scully and Stella walk up the stairs, trailing weed and wine and something else he’d allowed himself to view as mysteriously, mystically feminine.  He couldn’t remember how he’d thought sex would solve things, he couldn’t remember what he’d thought, if he’d been thinking at all, if the date-y tenor of the evening had reduced him to thinking about nothing more than sex.  He liked to think of himself as having deeper motives, of being above such crassness but then again, he’d once been a guy who received twenty percent off postcards from nine hundred numbers at Christmas.

 “I don’t know,” he said and stared at the side of her face.  He could tell she was trying to swallow away a sob, squinting and straightening her eyes to focus through the blanket of nighttime wetness.  This is what she looked like truly in pain.  This is what she looked like when she hated herself for a hard-fought decision.  This is what she looked like faithless and lonely and fearing for someone she could not single-handedly protect.  This is what it would have looked like when he left.

 “I’m so sorry,” he said.  She shook her head no.

 “It’s more my fault.  I’ve made things such a mess.  So dysfunctional.”

 “Not for this.”

 She looked at him as though this were not the time for any other subject - it wasn’t - but he’d been using that excuse, and excuses like it for too many years.  And she’d let him.

 “I’m sorry I left you with our son.”

 Scully’s face turned to granite, her body still as stone, as though she’d been poured into a mold of the position she’d up til then been choosing of her own will.  Had he really never simply apologized?   Could that be?  

 “I should have stayed.  Or I should have taken you both with me.”

 “Well, you were scared that - that --”

 “Yeah.”  There was no point trying to let her finish it, explain it.  He’d been scared to raise a child, that he’d ruin it.  He’d been too much of a coward to even face up to that fear.  The rest of it, the murderers and government conspiracies, the outside dangers, were maybe real and maybe not, but they’d certainly been convenient.

 “I was scared too,” she said and he placed a finger over her lips, trying to protect her from getting to the next part, the part where she took the blame for giving William up for adoption.   Her lips closed like a gate at his skin, and after a moment of considering resistance, pursed into the shape of a kiss.   He tucked his hand into his pocket, as if to preserve that kiss for later, some time he could better appreciate it.  

 “Have I ever really apologized before?” he asked.

 “I don’t know.  I was too angry to hear it if you did.”

 They both gazed down the walkway, their chins turning at a similar angle toward the small spattering of stars marking victory in the fray of fog and light pollution.  He stretched an arm around her and she sank heavily into the crook of his armpit, the way she used to do when they’d take walks near their home, or even when they were just friends and he was teasing her about something.  There was nothing to laugh about tonight.

 “She’s okay,” he said with foolish authority, glad for once that he was an easy believer.  He could not have lied to her right then.  “She’s okay, I promise.”  

 He kissed her hair, rubbed his nose in the oily zigzagging patterns of her scalp, these sandy copper pathways he knew like a shortcut home.  The London water didn’t strip it quite as clean and the rooty smell made him think of the scuzzy motels they’d slept at, the times she’d skipped showers just to spend twenty fewer minutes in a place she hated.  Her hand inched like a spider across his shirt, and her head lolled as she weakly lay her body like a flag across his torso.  They waited like this, hiding in plain sight as the sense of danger passed and he began to formulate a plan - they’d see if they could get a track on her cell.  They’d call the hospitals, just in case.  And probably Stella would walk back in the door in the middle of all of that, shake off her jacket with a stale Scotch-and-soda buzz, roll her eyes at them for making drama out of nothing.

 Inside, the phone rang.

 *

 Her eyes feel glued to one another across the bridge of her nose.  It’s a sticky and peeling feeling, that of a rotting synthetic compound holding her bones barely in place.  Her eyelids are gauzy and weak, letting in light, colors of a crime scene at first and then white, a blinding, stunning, bad news kind of white. There are voices, abrasive and inquisitive and instructive and she remembers something factual, useful amongst so many useless observations - her phone is broken.   It feels good to know at least this much without having to wait for someone to tell her.  

 Something else.  They’re at work on her body, these people, and she doesn’t like it.  She’s never been the kind of person people make a project out of.  She’s been in ruins as long as she can remember.  Paul Spector was the most recent to chisel the paint job, but others had been fucking with the foundation from the beginning.  None has ever been able to do the kind of damage she can do herself.

 There’s pressure, hands - or is that a machine - on her body, and she’s melting in the hot blast of satin-in-sunlight white and it’s her wedding day.  Twenty-one years old, she walks the aisle like a plank while people stare in their best suits and frocks.  She watches the carpet disappear beneath her feet as the drop approaches, feels everyone listening lustily for the splash.  She doesn’t want to smile but tries to look regal, at least - they want her to be beautiful while she falls, this much has been made clear to her since the day she was born.  And then she looks at Henry standing there, waiting for her with a smug smile and a tear in his eye and she well knows what a mistake looks like, but she’s seldom met a mistake she wasn’t willing to make.

 A sound - deafening, fate-splitting, a chorus of screeching machines - and she’s in Bridget’s beat-up Corolla, catching a ride home from the swimming pool, her daddy’s old BMW dying its British automobile death back in the car park.  She can’t bear to call a tow for it, not yet.  Bridget is comely and kind, eyes that shine like patent leather, a stranger who pats her old Japanese workhorse on its sturdy chest, says I like driving something I know will never let me down.  Stella says Well, where’s the joy in that.  The way Bridget laughs resonates with her as strong the engine under her toes.

 And then an American car and an American girl, and she’s thinking it’s the safest ride she’ll ever take.  Straight and straight-laced and separated by a continent’s worth of water.  But Scully persists like weather, warm and cool at once, gathering strength over the Atlantic year after year, waiting to be given a first name.  

 Stella, the doctors plead.  Stay with us, they say with their hands pressing on her chest, something poking down her throat, something squeezing her hand, pinching her skin.  Stay they say - it’s what everyone says when they’re trying to change her, make her  worth the effort they’ve spent.

 Stella.

 Stella...

 *

 “Stella?”

 Mulder swung faux-casually around the doorjamb.  She was awake, looking out the window as the English sun crept up, feeble and sage in its seniority.   The light fell sharply on the tops of her hands and across her face, threading shadows under bones and between tendons that made her look, for once, her age (and then some).

 He’d already been to see her once, twelve hours ago, after the first phone call - the one from the hospital administrators.  But Stella had been unconscious then.  The nurses had simply been trying the land line, hoping Stella didn’t live alone, hoping to find a worried husband or teenage son or boyfriend.   

 Yesterday had been relatively easy.  He’d had Scully to lead the way and Scully knew her way around a hospital cot.  She’d gone in alone when they first arrived, and he’d watched her whisper into Stella’s ear like an adult talking to a tantruming toddler.  He knew in desperate times, Scully became a magical thinker, a bargainer: if she promised enough goodies, Stella might come to her senses.  

 The doctors had assured them she was okay, and no one trusted doctors like Scully did, but the way she’d patted Stella’s chest, listened to her breath, taken her pulse, all in slightly manic succession, you wouldn’t have known it.  They’d wanted to keep Stella for a psych eval once she was awake.  He’d had to squeeze Scully’s hand to keep her from protesting in the name of Stella’s sleeping pride.

 Alone with her now, he was nervous, unsure how much responsibility he should bear for all this, and if not responsibility, animosity.  If he were Stella, he’d want someone to hate - and it was better him than herself or Scully.  He wasn’t sure if this was a suicide attempt or something less acute, but he’d been there a few times himself and the only thing that had ever stopped him was the fear that he’d fail at that too.  She looked at him, but only obliquely, turning quickly back to the window.  Her hello seemed like it was meant for someone who wasn’t there.

 His fingernails dug into the lint at the bottom of his pockets as he struggled not to show any discomfort.  He waited, paced in a semi-circle in the moat of linoleum between Stella’s bed and the empty one.  What was he doing here?  What was he doing alone with her?  He wished Scully were there.  He wished he’d taken Stella’s advice already, gotten his plane ticket back, started trying to get his life together as he’d been instructed to do.  He almost said as much out loud, but finally Stella tilted her head toward him ever-so-slightly, her bleary grey eyes blinking like they were trying to summon back the color.  It was a universal expression, or at least one that Scully also happened to have in her repertoire, a look he wished he had learned to identify years ago.  You can go, but I’d rather you stay.  

 He came around the other side of the bed, the one she seemed to prefer looking at, and sat down, pecked his mouth against his clamshelled hands.  “You look like you could use a drink, kiddo.”

 “I’d love one.”  Her voice was like chalk on a sidewalk, dry and smooth and vanishing.

 “Well, let’s see,” he said and tugged the IV bag.  “This is all we’ve got on tap.”  For a moment, it looked like she was going to laugh but then her face folded like a piece of tissue paper, and there was a polite pop of pained air from the back of her throat.  

 “Let’s go find something stronger,” he said.  “Passed your psych evaluation, high-five.”

 She shook her head irritatedly, looking more like herself as she did so.

 “They have to discharge and give me my clothes back.”  She grimaced.  “God, I don’t know if I want to see my clothes.”

 “You actually weren’t wearing them when they picked you up.”

 “How did I get here?”

 “You dialed an emergency before blacking out.”

 “How responsible of me,” she seethed, then began to swear on the exhale.  “Jesus Christ, did they know my fucking ribs were broken when they pumped my stomach?”

 “Scully would be able to answer that better.”

 She closed her eyes, for the first time showing the embarrassment, the humiliation he’d heard in her voice over the phone.  Come alone, she’d begged.  He’d been so delighted to hear her awake that he’d already waved Scully over.  The conversation that had followed in Stella’s foyer had not been fun.

 “She honored my request?” Stella asked.

 “Yes,” he said, trying not to hesitate.  He was pretty sure Stella could guess what kind of scene it had caused.

 “Is she going back to America?”

 “You want to make her cry, you do it.  I’ve done it plenty myself.”

 “I don’t want her to see me like this.”

 “She’s seen it, she was here for hours.  She’s seen worse.   She’s seen me worse.  Although… you might look worse because you’re paler and smaller, it comes off more pathetic.”

 One half her mouth almost grinned - almost.

 “So she’s going to be there when we get home?”

 “Yes, tied to the chair where I left her.”  It was just barely a joke.  “She’ll still be very hurt and somewhat furious, but probably too happy to see you on your own two feet to tell you that.”

 “Fuck,” Stella whispered, as though just remembering some new unfortunate detail in this series of very unfortunate events.  “Did I wear heels?”

 “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen you in anything else.”

 She nodded again and several moments of silence passed.  Her breath sounded like a faltering window fan and the corners of her eyes twitched as inhales turned to exhales.

 “We were worried, you know,” he said.

 Her deep-set doe eyes shifted downward.

 “How long will it take for them to come?” he asked.

 “I don’t know.”

 “Want me to go get you some sneakers or flip flops or something while we’re waiting?”

 She wet her lips with two swipes of tongue that only made them redder and rawer.  He’d grab her a Chapstick while he was at it.  

 “Yes,” she said, as though no one had ever offered to do something like that for her before.

 *

 It was half past midnight in the sleepiest big city in the world when Scully skipped down the wooden staircase like a woman late for an appointment.  He waited, unmoving, one arm pillowing his head, pressed against the sofa arm.  His feet were similarly dug into the other end, packing him in tightly so that his knees bent up in the middle like a warped two-by-four.  Stella had clearly not bought this piece of furniture with the idea that she might ever want to have a man sleep on it, and come to think of it, why would she?  Scully stood at his feet with her hands on her hips, her formal short-sleeved peach-colored pajamas setting off the pink in her cheeks - anger or an orgasm.  Considering the circumstances, he assumed it was the former, although where Stella was concerned, one never knew.

 “Can I watch TV here?” she asked.  “I can’t sleep.”

 “She snap at you again?”

 “Yeah.”

 “Sure,” he said.  She  looked at the flat-screen, sighed.  “Whats’a matter?”

 “She never set it up.”

 “You want me to play man of the house?”

 “I took my contacts out.”

 He got up, patted the couch for her.  

 “It’s too small for me anyway,” he urged, masking his delight with grumpiness.  Scully in her pressed pajamas watching movies with him.  Stella safe and alive in her bed.  Maybe his standards had been lowered by recent events, but it felt like a good night.

 “She likes baths.  I thought it would make her feel better.”

 “Maybe she doesn’t want to feel better yet,” he said, fiddling with some wires.  He turned the set on and found a remote, clicked.  BBC.  Another BBC.  Another.  How many fucking BBCs did they have?  “How many of these do they need?”

 “It’s fine,” she said.  She made room for him on the couch but he grabbed a throw pillow and blanket from the chair and set himself up on the floor beside her.

 “Go ahead, get comfortable,” he said and she took the direction to heart immediately, snuggled down into the couch cushion, this thing that had just moments ago been cramping his style suddenly looking deep and soft and marshmallowy around her tiny frame.  He lay down on the floor, his head just below hers, and pretended to watch the news along with her for a few minutes.

 “Was it hard for you, the idea of me sleeping up there with her?”

 He rolled over.

 “Not so long as I know all she’s doing is yelling at you.”

 She gave her sloe gin-fizzy smile, the one he’d always found particularly worth treasuring all the more for how quickly it vanished.

 “Am I incapable of doing this?  Caring for someone?” she asked and he wondered if he had ever loved her more.  “Why am I always failing at it?”

 “You’re not failing, Scully,” he said softly.  “We’re failing you.”

 Her forehead wrinkled like she might cry and she hung her hand down the side of the sofa.  Behind him, crisp accents spoke of international atrocities with such poise it bordered on indifference.  It occurred to him that almost everything that was ever done in America was a pale imitation of what was done here.  

 He hooked his fingers under her dangling ones and played them like piano keys.

 “I don’t know that it’s so dysfunctional, you know.  I mean, maybe the whole sad threesome idea.”

 An embarrassed sniff, her eyes closing on the long blink...

 “But you know.  The whole thing.  There’s a lot of love here.  More than most people have.  What’s dysfunctional about that?”

 And then the tears streamed down her cheeks onto the expensive brushed cotton fabric of Stella’s dollhouse-sized, cheerleader-sized, jockey-sized sofa.

 “Thank you, Mulder.”

 He kissed her hand before she took it back to wipe her eyes, tuck it under her face, and pretend to watch the news again.

 *

 The next morning, he folded his blanket and quietly placed it on the chair, careful not to wake Scully as he climbed the stairs like a man going uninvited to the queen’s court.  His back groaned from the beating it had taken in his sleep.

 The bedroom door was closed, but he knew Stella didn’t sleep much.  He rapped on it with one knuckle, summoning his confidence.

 “Come in,” she said froggily.  She was staring at the ceiling, looking like a captive in her own house.

 “What are you doing?” he asked, taking the liberty of perching himself next to a potted plant on the windowsill.  There were layers of grey and white and beige silk and cashmere draped over her desk chair and almost every edged surface of the bedroom.  He would’ve expected her to be neater.

 “Thinking.”

 “I ordered you a new phone.”

 “Thanks.  I could have done it.”

 “I know that.  But I did it.”

 “Would’ve given me something to do.”

 “Stella.”

 “What?” she snapped, at least looking at him now.

 “I know you don’t like this, needing people, helplessness.  I’m going to go back home, and it’ll be fifty percent less of that shit to deal with.”

 She took a deep breath, a sigh, winced.

 “I’m being an awful bitch, I know that.”

 He sealed his lips and raised his eyebrows.  Not the word he would’ve used, but yes, he’d been planning to get around to an accusation to that effect.

 “It’s just… it’s embarrassing.  I did this to myself.”

 He waved his hand in protest.

 “No need, really.”

 She looked appreciative, rubbed her ribs with the heel of her hand either to self-soothe or to check they were still there, he wasn’t sure.

 “What about Scully?” she asked.

 “I’ll tell her I’m going when she wakes up.”

 “No.  I meant take her with you.”

 He communicated this was out of the question with a simple look and she stared back up at the ceiling, recalcitrant in her icy brand of stoicism.

 “Why don’t you just let her love you?”  Stay he’d meant to say, but now he guessed the two words almost always meant the same thing.

 She looked back at him, eyes blooming like violets.  The pigment had restored itself to the couple of places on her face it normally existed and he recalled the day they’d talked on the hotel bed, the day she’d climbed into his lap and held his gaze, sunk her lips, pillow-soft and syrupy with liquor, into his.

 “Because I don’t want to become you,” she answered matter-of-factly.  He cocked his head to encourage her to explain.  “You just let her love you and love you and love you.  There’s no end to what she’ll give.”

 His eyes burned.

 “You don’t think I deserve her?” he asked.

 “That’s not what I said.  It was just an answer to your question.”

 The tension hung in the room like a contagion and she broke it by naming the scene he imagined they’d both always think of when they had tension between them.

 “That time I tried to fuck you?” she asked, seeming to read his mind.  “Why didn’t you?”

 “I felt like I was betraying her.”

 “That’s the difference between us.  You felt you owed her when you didn’t.  I can’t feel I owe someone even when I do.  She needs that.”

 He nodded.  Maybe.  He wouldn’t presume to know what Scully needed, could never read her like that, no matter how well he knew her, not like she could read him.  All relationships required some inequalities to make them work, and this seemed to be one of theirs.

 “So you have to get your shit together,” Stella finished.

 “I’ll try,” he said. “But you have to try too.”

 One side of her mouth quirked upward, amused.

 “And then may the best man win?”

 “Something like that.”

 He pushed himself up from the windowsill and made for the door, but Stella interrupted, unexpectedly opening her arms.  Her ribs were too sore to contract her torso the little bit that was needed to sit forward, so Mulder had to peel her lower back forward in order to hug her.  Her body felt as though she might break at the slightest infraction.  But he knew nothing was further from the truth.

 *

 He pressed his forehead to Scully’s the next morning in front of the refrigerator as he handed her a glass of orange juice.   He’d brushed his hair back, shaved again, put his duffel by the door.  He wanted her to feel like he was going off to become someone better than whom she’d left, and he thought he was making a good show of it.  He rested his hands on her shoulders, smiling a little as his fingers drifted halfway down her back.  She loomed so large in his life, he tended to forget how small she was.

 Just past the concrete arches that separated the rooms, Stella sat sipping tea in the armchair, her first foray down the steps since she’d been home.  She’d said she wanted to see him off and he’d known this meant she’d be there to distract Scully in that hateful moment of silence and uncertainty that always follows a significant exit - the kind of exit you’re not sure will ever reverse course.  The idea of Scully in need had given Stella back some of her kindness, her generosity.  But now, as Scully put her hands on either side of his neck, two warm starfish sticking to the sandy stubble left by Stella’s cheap disposable razor, he wished she weren’t there.  He felt both selfish and selfless for feeling this.

 Scully kissed him gently, insignificantly, on the cheek.

 “Take care of yourself, Mulder,” she said and though Stella knew everything wrong with him, and maybe more, he was embarrassed that she could hear.  Scully’s lips trembled a little, chapped and parted, the upper lip unconsciously sneering the way it did when she didn’t try to tame it into a smile, frown, or pout.

 “Stop being silly,” Stella said hoarsely without looking at them, barely the outline of a sentence and still with the authority of a general.  “Kiss him goodbye.”

 And Scully did kiss him - steadily, sturdily, tongueless and guileless on the strong upsweep of an inhale - he could only hope it wasn’t goodbye.

(click below to continue)