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There isn’t a ladder in the old warehouse.
Local law enforcement taped off and cataloged the crime scene weeks ago, but they’d somehow overlooked a little loft space near the ceilings. It’s just a small, shadowy nook, easily missed, at least ten feet up off the ground.
“No ladder,” Mulder says, hovering unnecessarily close to her ear.
“No ladder.” Scully shines her flashlight up at the ledge, but the beam of light reveals nothing but motes of dust.
“Maybe I could, uh…” Mulder scrunches up his face in consideration, then shrugs. “Boost ya?”
“Boost me?”
“If you climb up on my back, piggyback-style, then sit on my shoulders, chicken-style, and get your hands planted over the edge, then I’ll help push up your thighs so you’re —”
“So help me God, Mulder, if the next words out of your mouth are doggy-style —”
“Scully!” Mulder whistles a low, scandalized whistle, but his eyebrows are delighted. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I was going to say no such thing!”
She rolls her eyes. “So that’s your best idea? Boosting me?”
He simply smirks. “I’m game if you’re game.”
“If your knees are game then so am I.” Before she can overthink it, and before Mulder can say any more about animal-based body positions or make any quips whatsoever involving game or livestock, Scully starts to hike up her skirt.
Mulder freezes, his face glitching on a panicked half-smile. “What are you doing?” He asks it low and urgent, without a single ounce of banter inside of it. If anything, he sounds almost afraid.
She does her best to glare at him as she performs the undignified wriggle required to gather this particular skirt up around her waist. “You promised me we weren’t going out in the field at all this week, Mulder.”
“What could that possibly have to do with—” He gestures ineffectually at her lower half, apparently at a loss for words. For once in his life, she thinks, with equal parts bitterness and triumph.
“Well, if I’d known this morning that the day’s work might require me mounting you, I wouldn’t have worn a pencil skirt.” Scully regrets the word ‘mounting’ immediately. His eyes are dark in the dim room and a little glazed, almost glassy; she can feel the flush climbing her neck. “Besides, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.” It’s hard to feel as casual about it as she sounds while he’s intently watching her peel off her nylons, her wool skirt now bunched up around her belly. This pair of pantyhose is fresh, and she’s unwilling to sacrifice it to the rough wood paneling. Or to his clumsy fingers, which is definitely not an image she’ll come back to the next time she breaks out her vibrator.
It’s true that they’ve seen each other in various states of dress and undress: in hospital beds, in quarantine chambers, in survival situations, while on the road, as cases necessitated. And beyond that, they’ve both taken a pretty cavalier approach to clothing, or lack thereof, ever since she’d stood before him in her bra and underwear on their first case. Mulder, for his part, had never been shy or remotely self-conscious about whipping his shirts on or off in front her or breezing around a hotel room in nothing but his boxer shorts and an open robe. This shouldn’t be any different.
But as Scully steps out of her pumps, one at a time, then tucks her stockings carefully into her left shoe and stands again, she feels Mulder’s eyes trace all the way up her bare legs. Her cheeks burn. He takes his time, not even pretending not to look.
The last time Mulder had seen more than a glimpse of her undergarments, she’d been young, green, and lacking disposable income. America had still been shaking off the ’80s and the Intimates section at JC Penney had been a sea of white cotton and taupe polyester. And so her bras and underwear had always been plain and affordable: practical creams and beiges; sensible, no-frills box store underwear for sensible Dana Scully.
But she was firmly into her thirties now, and the ’90s were past their tipping point. There were more options available every day. It was only natural that Scully had traded her hi-cut white cotton bikini briefs for the elegant simplicity (and lack of pantyline) of basic black thongs. They were still practical, but they made her feel sexier. And if she was going to inevitably end up with her underwear wedged up her ass while chasing an armed perp or traversing yet another cursed forest with Mulder, there might as well be less of it and it might as well start there to begin with.
Scully watches him watch her. The concrete floor is cold beneath her bare feet. Mulder swallows when he registers the skimpy black triangle covering her pubic hair. His face still has not settled on a readable expression. It’s entirely possible that she has finally broken him.
Searching herself, she discovers that it feels a little bit good.
Scully blows out a breath and claps Mulder on the back. “Ready, piggy?”
“Oink oink.” He stirs from his reverie and crouches down low enough that she can clamber up onto his back, his arms tucking under her knees to hold her in place, but it’s surprisingly difficult to hoist herself from there up to his shoulders.
After a prolonged struggle, he gently lowers her. They make a second attempt, but the skirt bunched around Scully’s middle hinders their efforts. It’s difficult enough for her to get traction while maintaining balance as it is, but the satin lining slip-sliding around as she tries to clamber up him is not helping matters.
“Down,” she says, and they both stand there panting for a moment.
Scully gives a futile tug on her side zipper. Mulder respectfully averts his eyes, as if to compensate for gawking at her crotch a few minutes ago. The thing is irrevocably stuck, and Scully’s becoming flushed and frustrated. Frankly, she feels ridiculous standing barefoot in an abandoned warehouse, pink-cheeked and half-undressed, wearing her best pencil skirt like a belt, all for lack of a ladder.
This is how the titles in Mulder’s film collection start.
Taking a deep, stabilizing breath, she banishes the thought and turns to her partner. “Mulder. I need your help.”
When he looks at her, he’s almost sheepish, keeping his eyes pointedly on her face. “With what?”
Scully sighs and gestures to her skirt. “My zipper’s stuck, and I have to get this thing off if this plan is going to work.”
Mulder’s tongue darts out to wet his lip. He steps forward, into her space, standing facing her left side, where the zipper is. He smoothes down the part of the skirt adjacent to the zipper, his fingers brushing her hip through the buttery wool. Biting his lip in concentration, he gently tugs the zipper pull down, but it won’t budge. “It’s caught on the other side, I think.” His fingertips drift to the waistband of the skirt. “May I?”
“Yes.” It’s barely above a whisper. He’s so close. Mulder’s trembling fingers dip inside of her skirt. His knuckles brush her bare skin and he has the decency not to acknowledge the shudder it sends through her. She’s devoted considerable thought to his hands on her like this, taking off her clothing. She turns her head slightly away from Mulder, as though he will find her fantasies writ large across her face if she makes eye contact with him while he’s undressing her. With great care and precision, he stretches the fabric taut on either side of the zipper from within her skirt with two fingers, so it won’t get caught up this time. With his other hand, he gives a firm pull, and the zipper comes free.
Mulder lets go and Scully’s skirt drops, pooling into a pile of satin and wool on the warehouse floor. She turns back to him. He’s standing only inches from her, looking her right in the eye. A current of unspoken electricity runs between them. Is it just heat lightning or is it the third rail? How badly could someone — her — get hurt?
This time Mulder drops into a deeper squat, as low to the ground as he can manage. “Just get all the way on from here,” he says.
“Mulder.” She’s uncertain. “Your back…
“Is strong and supple, thank you very much. I work out, Scully.” Apparently, he’s regaining some of his essential Mulderness, that very specific flavor of smart-ass joie de vivre.
“Are you sure? What about your knees?”
He grins. “They’re replaceable.”
She snorts and shakes her head, swinging her left leg over his shoulder. The feel of his neck against her bare inner thigh is incredibly distracting. He brings his left hand up and clamps it around her leg above the knee, holding her fast to his shoulder. The warm pads of his fingers curl in to wrap around her inner thigh. She swings her other leg over; he grips her tightly and heaves into standing.
The thing is, it’s incredibly intimate. Her cool inner thighs rub against his warm neck, and there’s only a thin scrap of black fabric between her hot cunt and his cervical spine. His hands, broad and heavy on her bare thighs, anchor her against him. His fluffy hair tickles her legs when he moves. It’s not hard to imagine the kinds of things that could be, would be happening if he were facing her in this position. There’s a pull low in her belly and she can already feel herself starting to get wet.
What the fuck had they been thinking?
“You good, Scully?” Mulder’s voice is thicker than usual. She can feel his rapid pulse pounding two inches from her cunt.
“I‘ll thank you to leave this part out of the report,” Scully says, “but yes, Mulder. I’m fine. Are you?”
He clears his throat, and his fingers dig into her thighs when she wobbles the tiniest bit. “Never been better.”
Mulder takes one careful step, then another. He has a good grasp on her, but she still sways a bit as he moves. As an unconscious reaction to being thrown slightly off-balance, she yanks at his hair.
He sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Go easy, Scully.”
“Sorry, Mulder.” Her face hot, Scully loosens her grip on his hair and instead braces her core for stability. Tightening her abs changes her posture, jolting her clit against the back of Mulder’s neck. The sudden contact shocks a little gasp out of her, and Mulder tenses beneath her.
When they’re finally close enough to the little loft area, she leans forward, anchoring her arms on the platform with her legs still bracketing his head. She shines a flashlight into all the crevices, but the space is too small to hoist herself into, in doggy-style or in any other position. She sweeps the light over every surface of the nook, but there’s nothing to be seen.
“Zilch,” she calls down to Mulder, who — as far as she can tell from her perch, at least — has remained noble in the face of her bare thighs clenching and unclenching around his skull as she flails around up here.
“You sure?” He calls back up.
Scully does her due diligence, sending the flashlight’s beam around again to ensure she’s not missing any stains or substances, any scraps or fibers, any clues. In the process of her investigation, her thighs tense in a particularly evocative way against his slightly-stubbled jaw. Through her mortification, Scully is glad that at least this time Mulder makes an involuntary little noise too.
The downside of having the playing field evened is that now she can’t help but imagine him making that same involuntary little noise directly against her cunt, then imagine the wet warmth of his tongue teasing her through her thong, then imagine him looking up at her while sucking her clit into his mouth.
Scully’s thong is definitely damp, and as she stops searching and settles back in on his shoulders, it comes into direct contact with his neck again. The longer she’s wrapped around him like this, the worse it gets, and she’s struggling to banish her concerns that he can feel it too.
As he attempts stepping back from the wall to safely let her down, Mulder lurches backward. Scully jostles, then clutches at his hands, which are both still wrapped across the tops of her thighs. Her bare feet dangle at his waist, and as she’s jarred, one foot gets caught in his belt. Instinctively, she seeks purchase with her other foot. Her insole makes contact with something warm and firm that is definitely not his firearm.
“Fuck, Scully,” Mulder hisses. It’s hard to tell if he means it as rebuke or encouragement; she finds she wants to keep her foot where it is, stroke it along his length and see what other sounds of desperation she can coax out of him. Reluctantly, she pulls it away. Mulder pivots, then walks backwards two careful steps until both of their spines are pressed against the wall perpendicular to the little loft space.
Scully’s brain unhelpfully volunteers a mental image of Skinner walking into the warehouse and finding them like this: Scully, sans pants, perched on Mulder’s shoulders, both of them leaning back against the wall, flushed and disordered, trying and failing to compose themselves.
Her heart is hammering. She hears his ragged breathing. The silence between them may suffocate her.
“What,” she tries, half-hearted and at least thirty seconds too late, “no gun jokes?”
But Mulder does not rise to the bait, or laugh it off, or react to her attempt at diffusing the tension in any way at all. They’re well beyond all that. She feels him take a shaky inhale, hold it, then let it out.
“Scully,” he breathes, and she knows from his voice the exact earnest, pained face he’s making, even though she can’t see him from up here. “I can smell you.”
Scully cannot summon any embarrassment or hesitation, because he says it like it’s the best thing that’s happened to him in his entire life. He’s so evidently turned on that there’s no room for her to feel offended.
Carefully, Mulder takes his hands off of the tops of her thighs, ensuring all the while that he’s still taking her weight. He turns himself, very slowly, to face her. As one shoulder slips out from under her thigh, he replaces it with a broad, strong hand, supporting her from below, almost cupping her ass. When he finishes his maneuvering, Scully still has her thighs on his shoulders and her back braced against the wall, but now her bare feet dangle down against his back and his stupidly lush lips are close enough to her clitoris that she can feel his breath warming her inner thighs.
He closes his eyes for moment, his face wrecked and reverent, made of only worship and want. Then he actually sniffs, boldly takes a genuine whiff of her, and Scully can’t help but gasp. Mulder groans. His eyes snap open and he gazes up at her, desperate, his pupils huge.
There’s nowhere else this could be going. From here, all roads end with his mouth on her cunt.
“I want you, Scully.”
Scully looks down at him, mustering her most imperious expression, as though her heart weren’t all rabbity in her throat. She rakes her French-manicured nails over his scalp, lifts one brow, and fixes him with the kind of then-prove-it look that more commonly punctuates their debates about paranormal phenomena. She flexes her thighs and Mulder’s eyes drop closed again in either agony or ecstasy: possibly both.
“Then have me, Mulder.”
The for lunch is heavily implied.
He doesn’t have to be told twice.
Immediately, Mulder buries his face in her cunt through her underwear. His hands slide up to fully grip and support her exposed ass. He groans against her, mouths at her, hits her clit with his nose, which sends a euphoric little shockwave running through her.
“Jesus, Scully."
He takes the soaked gusset of her thong in his teeth and pulls it back, working as much of it into his mouth as he can manage. He looks right up at her, a challenge in his eyes. His mouth and throat work, like he’s trying to suck her juices out of the fabric, and Scully moans a little, her head falling back against the wall. It’s exquisite torture, the way he’s making her wait for direct contact.
Mulder lets her underwear snap back and mouths franticly at her cunt through it again, and though Scully’s weight is mostly supported by his shoulders and the wall, the whole arrangement remains precarious. Every time he hits her clit or does something especially revelatory with his mouth, their balance gets thrown off by her little shudders. It’s difficult to fully give herself over to the moment when this could easily end with a bone-breaking fall to the warehouse floor.
After an unexpected arch of her back nearly topples them, Mulder extracts himself enough to glance up at Scully.
“Hold tight.”
He grips her firmly by the hips, and then he shuffles them both sideways a few steps. She redistributes her weight slightly so her top won’t catch on the rough wall behind her as they travel along it. She has no idea what he’s doing but has no reason to stop trusting him now.
“How many pull-ups could you do back at Quantico, Scully?” Mulder casts his eyes up at the cross-beam he’s centered her under.
She engages her core and grasps the beam with both hands. “Enough.” It gives them sufficient stability to proceed.
Before Mulder can continue to tease her for five hundred more years by mouthing at her through her thong, Scully brings one hand back down to wrench the gusset of her underwear to the side. Mulder laughs against her thigh, sending hot little puffs of his breath wafting over her bare, wet, aching cunt. Without fully meaning to, she jerks her hips towards him.
“So impatient.” He says it lazy and casual, like they do this every day. He says it with the confidence of someone highly credentialed in the field of eating pussy, which she has no doubt he is. It’s annoyingly sexy, much like most things Mulder does.
“Stop… wasting my… time, Mulder.” She manages to rasp it out. She slips her left hand off of the crossbeam and curls her fingers into his hair, yanking him to her.
He chuckles again, half into her cunt, and it vibrates through her in an extremely compelling way. “God you’re wet, Scully,” he says, craning up to meet her eyes. “Is all of this really for me?”
There’s something so intimate about his eye contact. The question is unfairly sexy if she interprets it as dirty talk. And why wouldn’t she — his voice is throaty and self-assured, his smile smug as hell — but there’s also real vulnerability in it. She runs her nails over his scalp again, more tenderly this time, her other hand holding tight to the rough wood of the crossbeam. Her underwear are still hitched to the side.
“Yes, Mulder.”
“Say it.”
“It’s for you.”
He melts into her with a sigh and there’s no other way to to describe it, really: Fox Mulder kisses her cunt, open-mouthed and passionate, using all of his lips and tongue. He keeps casting his eyes up to her, transparent in his eagerness to please. The selective laser beam of his incredibly intense concentration is now dedicated to exploring her, tasting her, feeling her, learning what she likes. Pleasing her.
It’s exceptional.
Other men have gone down on her before, with adequate proficiency. But where it was a menu item at all, it had often felt perfunctory and perhaps even performative, like something a guy might throw in for two minutes before shoving his dick into her in order to prove that he was an enlightened modern man. Ethan had spelled the alphabet with his tongue with the same embarrassing bravado of someone tying a cherry stem into a knot in their mouth at a bar, like he expected her to be impressed. At least there was an attempt at technique, but it had always struck Scully as a little unimaginative, a little uninspired, and he never hit quite the right spots. Sometimes she’d let him get to “M” and then fake it so they could both move on.
Mulder, in contrast, puts his inherent sense of unlimited possibility to good use when going down on her. He nibbles and licks and sucks. He tries a variety of speeds and intensities, responding to what makes her gasp or moan or pull his hair. He buries his face in her and gives it his all. He’s enjoying himself. The difference is immediately evident to Scully, and immense in its impact. Every single nerve ending in her body is alive with pleasure. Mulder eats her out with unbridled enthusiasm, because he wants to, and because he wants her to feel good.
This may be her new favorite activity.
She moves the hand that’s been in his hair to pinch her own nipple through her clothes. At its absence, Mulder peers up at her, then groans right into her cunt when he sees her hand on her breast.
She’s bucking into him now, with just enough force that she has to move the hand on her nipple back to the crossbeam. Little noises spill out of her unbidden, and every time she makes one Mulder moans against her. As the desperation between them increases, he plunges his tongue into her cunt, fucking it into her while his nose bumps her clit in an absolutely exquisite way. It’s a little sloppy, as they’re both coming unravelled, and the thought flashes across her mind that the idea of it is at least as hot as the sensation. She’s right on the brink, squeezing his head between her thighs, when he pulls his tongue out of her with a grunt, licks a broad swath up her center, and sucks her clit into his mouth.
“Oh, oh, Mulder!” Scully comes hard, hanging tight to the cross beam with her thighs clenching around Mulder, then shaking as she spills onto his face. That’s new, and Mulder’s responding sounds send vibrations into her sensitive clit. Her pleasure crashes through her so hard that she sees tiny little sparks at the edge of her vision. Her toes curl in against his back. She realizes her thighs are squeezed so tight around his head that she has to ease up to ensure she’s not suffocating him. Mulder releases her clit and laps at her gently as she comes down. His eyes are soft, adoring, and every time she opens her own eyes, he’s looking right at her like she’s something miraculous.
Scully goes mostly limp, sated, and he eases her down, guiding her knees off of his shoulders so they hang loosely over his elbows. They’re eye to eye now, and her half-exposed cunt presses directly into the prominent bulge in his pants.
“Fuck, Scully,” Mulder says. “You’re amazing.”
Still sex-drunk, she fumbles ineffectually for his cock, which continues to demonstrate its ardent interest, but he stops her with a soft smile.
“Hey, hey,” he says, pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Don’t worry about that just yet.”
Heavy-lidded but smiling, Scully twines her hands around Mulder’s neck and pulls him closer. He gently slips his arms out from under her knees, and she wraps her legs around his waist instead. His hands find her ass and he clutches her tightly to him. He presses his forehead to hers and closes his eyes. His face is wet with her fluids and lit with happiness; her heart surges with raw affection for him.
“Mulder,” she says, “look at me,” and wishes that she didn’t see a bit of guard go up in his eyes when he did, like he’s expecting her to let him down easy.
Funnily enough, his tongue inside of her a few minutes ago wasn’t the point of no return. It’s this, what she’s about to do next, that there’s no going back from.
Scully lets a hand slip up from his neck to gently cup Mulder’s cheek. And then, eyes open, knowing exactly what she’s doing, she cranes forward to finally kiss him.
Way back in junior high, some of the girls who had made out regularly, the ones with boyfriends, would hold court in the bathroom by the gymnasium and proselytize to a rapt audience of the girls who had not. Young Dana Scully would shove her way through to pee and roll her eyes, in the privacy of her stall, at the melodramatic claims insisting that a good kiss tasted like SweeTarts or felt like holding a sparkler. Logically, she had been sure — for she was yet to be initiated — a mouth would taste like a mouth, and possibly also like whatever else had been in it recently. A kiss would feel like a mouth on a mouth and the sensitive nerves of the lips subsequently causing the brain to deliver a cocktail of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin to the body. So sure, of course it would feel good. But there was no way a good kiss was exactly like eating the first ripe raspberry of the summer or like if Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers was a feeling or whatever other bullshit Susie McCarthy was peddling. Even then, Scully had been far more interested in the basic facts of biology than puerile poetry. Overall, in back stairwells and at prom bonfires and in dorm rooms, in Daniel’s hotel rooms and Jack’s office and Ethan’s well-appointed apartment, her skepticism had largely borne out. Kissing was pleasant. Sex could be very good. What was forbidden was compelling, probably for the usual religious and psychological reasons. The corresponding biological reactions were as anticipated. None of it had ever made her want to pen a sonnet.
But now her lips touch Mulder’s, and it’s not just a kiss. It’s the kiss, so long deferred. It’s him, and it’s her, and it’s them. His lips slip open and he makes a sweet, breathy little sound into her mouth. When she slides her tongue between his lips, she tastes herself on him, so that even this, their first kiss, is heady with the earthy taste of their two bodies combined. She’s still Catholic enough to register the subversive sacredness therein. This kiss is fundamentally a mouth on a mouth like any other, yes, but it’s also heat lightning, and the third rail, and holding a sparkler (fireworks et cetera), and so, so much dopamine, considering the epic orgasm he’s just visited upon her. Beyond spark and current, it’s grounded in a deep knowing — knowing his lunch order and the weight of his hand on the small of her back and how he’s going to finish his next sentence and that he’ll never stop searching — and a ferocious loving — loving Fox Mulder more fiercely and completely than she’s ever loved anyone or anything else in her whole life — and the long patience of cicadas, of certain wildflowers that sleep in the ground for years before they ever bloom.
It’s the first hot cup of coffee in the morning. She wants to wake up to this kiss every day.
Scully tugs Mulder’s bottom lip between her teeth. He chases it, then sucks her bottom lip into his mouth in turn, then kisses her long and slow and sensual, in a way that feels like a promise. Finally, he pulls back, brushing his nose against hers.
They hover there together in a sort of post-kiss liminal state. Scully realizes with alarm that she doesn’t know how to stick the dismount. They can’t just memory-hole this one and never talk about it, can’t go on with business as usual like he’d never made her come so hard the edges of her vision sparked and fizzed, like he’d never kissed her in a way that filled her blissed-out rat brain with the word “forever.” But, regettably, they’re them, and she’s not sure how they stop that from happening.
Then Scully’s stomach grumbles, an audible gurgling, and somehow that’s what saves them.
“Work up an appetite, Agent Scully?” Mulder looks at her with a wry, smoldering coyote grin, his chin still shiny with her come.
Scully unwraps her legs from his waist and he gently lowers her, putting her bare feet back on solid ground. “Starving, actually,” she says, tilting her head back to assess him. With her heels off, he looms. “You?”
His hands land on her hips where she’s still backed against the wall. He pretends to consider. “I could eat again,” he says, goofy-sexy, and when he waggles his brows she’s not sure whether to slap him or jump his bones.
“Oh, get it together, will you?” She rolls her eyes at him but cannot fully suppress her smile.
Mulder gives her a wicked little sardonic salute, then pulls his shirt out of his pants so he can wipe his mouth on the bottom of it. He doesn’t break eye contact the entire time.
Scully raises both eyebrows then reapplies her own poker face. Still looking at him, she hooks her thumbs under the band of her thong and shimmies out of it. He’s wide-eyed and open-mouthed, just as she’d hoped. Once fully extricated, she slips the sodden thong into his front pants pocket, giving his evident erection a fond little squeeze from within the pocket. Then she pats him lightly on the ass and steps over to where she dropped her skirt and shoes.
“For me?” He just stands there, frozen with awe, as though he’s just won the lottery. Bless this brilliant, idiotic man.
She half-snorts as she steps into her pencil skirt. “I think you earned them.”
“You’re just… not gonna wear any underwear? For the whole rest of the day?” Finding novel new ways to break his brain is already proving to be extremely gratifying.
Scully zips up her skirt and flashes her brows at him. “I don’t see how you’ve left me any other choice.”
Mulder groans, then trots to catch up with her as she slips on her pumps and starts striding toward their car. “Are you trying to kill me, Scully?”
“Shut up, Mulder,” she says, just as his reassuring hand lands on the small of her back, but she smiles softly at him so that he’ll know what she really means is something more like, I love you, you absolute goober. “And get in the car. I’m taking you out for ribs.”