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Mexico prelude - St. Louis Blues
by MJ
mjr91@aol.com
Have you ever really, really wanted something? And realized that you couldn't have it? Worse yet, have no idea how you would go about getting it if you could have it? For some kids, it's a pony. For some adults, it's a sailboat, or chucking work and taking a hiking trip around the world. For me, the impossible desire of a good two or three years was named Walter Skinner. Walter S. Skinner, FBI Assistant Director, muscular idol and Hoover Building collective lust object. Also…previously married, though he'd never worn a ring and he'd never mentioned his wife. Not until…well, that's another story. Worse, my immediate supervisor. Worse yet, if he was married, more likely than not he was straight, which I certainly wasn't. Well, I'm still not, of course…but we're talking about then, not now.
Now, it's not that I didn't like women. Lord knows I let Phoebe and Diana walk all over me. But I'd always been interested in guys, as much if not more. Not that I'd ever done anything about it. Hell, I know what you're thinking—he went to Oxford, for crying out loud, the home of institutional queerness, and didn't get laid? Well, in a word…no. The word "chickenshit" comes to mind, looking back at it. Hmm, maybe I shouldn't say I never did anything. I was in a couple of fairly drunken clinches with a classmate or two, and I got as far as going to bed with one guy and jerking each other off. But that's as far as it went. Hey, I said "chickenshit" and I meant it.
Getting assigned to working with Alex Krycek—now, there I almost managed to cure myself of an annoying case of near virginity. From the moment that rat bastard made big puppy eyes at me with those gorgeous green eyes it was all I could do not to rip off my clothes. That's why I kept pushing him off of me—I wanted the bastard so badly I scared myself. He kept waiting for me to make a play for him and I was scared to death to do it, I was scared to death of making a fool of myself. What the hell did I know about making a pass at another guy? Not a damn thing. So I kept waiting for him to actually come on to me, and he never did; he just kept flirting. Then Duane Barry abducted Scully, and Krycek disappeared…and I was really, really glad that I'd never gotten involved with him. I think I'd have killed myself if I thought I'd been having an affair with someone responsible for what had happened to Scully.
As the whole Krycek thing slowly buried itself in the back of my memory, I found myself noticing Walter Skinner. I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed him in the first place; I guess I'd just been too intimidated at being supervised by one of the most infamous hardnoses in the Bureau. I had no idea then that he was one of the people responsible for rescuing me from Bill Patterson's supervision in the first place, that he'd been looking to move me under his direct supervision for two years before it actually happened. It wasn't so much anything to do with Krycek that made me notice Walter Skinner, I think, as the fact that I was finally starting not to be scared of him, finally realizing that he just might be a human being.- not to mention the most studworthy thing on two legs. Then came that business with Sharon, his soon- to-be ex-wife. That was when I realized that the man made me seriously weak in the knees. It was also when I started wondering if the interest he'd begun taking in me might be something more than purely professional, though he never did anything overt that would have proved it.
Then came Saint Louis. It was a trip I hadn't really been looking forward to going on. The heat in Saint Louis had been broadcast over the whole country as hot and wet enough to steam shrimp. The regional office was undergoing restructuring, and there was only a slight fiasco in the way the agents assigned to the task had been handling a case that obviously involved demon- possessed toys in the sloppiest way possible. Hell, you'd think the slobs had never heard of a possessed ventriloquist's dummy before. Two agents were in the hospital from failure to watch "Twilight Zone" reruns and old Karen Black TV movies. The safari wardrobe needed to survive the heat wasn't being furnished by the Bureau, meaning showing up in Saint Louis in…I cringe to think of it…wool serge. I guess there's no need to go over my infamous sartorial habits. I'd already ruined a couple of thousand-dollar suits in bad conditions, but damn it, I wasn't going to be able to claim expenses for clothing ruined by cruddy weather. That'd go about as far with Accounting as the suit I'd tried claiming when Eugene Tooms slimed it.
So anyway, Scully and I went out to Saint Louis to show the regionals how it's done—I can't believe there were no "Night Stalker" watchers in that office—and Skinner came along to supervise the mess they were making of the reorganization. I was glad he'd come along, for once. If I said, "You're going after a demonically possessed ventriloquist's dummy, and do you carry holy water around with you?" without major backup, I'd be stomped into the pavement. If Skinner said, "All agents on this case will carry crucifixes and load silver bullets," they'd damn well carry crucifixes and silver bullets and like it. We flew in the day before meeting with the regionals, planning to review first and gang up on them the next day. Plans, however, got slightly rearranged, first by the baggage compartment on the plane and then by the rest of the universe.
If I ever find the bastard whose cologne leaked on my suitcase, so help me, there'll be a bullet through him. Scully nearly choked on the fumes from that drugstore Calvin Klein knockoff in our cab, and I was seriously afraid of permanent clothing discoloration, not to mention smelling like a Calcutta bordello for the duration. Skinner got picked up by the SAC and dropped off at the hotel. He didn't get poisoned, the lucky bastard. Anyway, we got to the hotel, and I spent the better part of an hour finding what was salvagable of what I'd packed—a pair of sweats, my shoes and running shoes, and a pair of running shorts -and bribing the concierge into rushing the rest of my stuff to the cleaners for an immediate miracle. I showered to get the cruddiness of the mixture of airplane air circulation, cheap cologne, and the Saint Louis humidity off of me, pulled on the sweats, and tried to figure out what I'd do for a shirt for the evening. I obviously wasn't dining downstairs in the hotel's four-star dining room in sweats, but Scully and I do room service a lot anyway—nonetheless, I wanted to cover up. Hotel air conditioning can get pretty fierce.
Scully always had this habit of sleeping in big, sloppy men's T-shirts, nearly big enough for her to use as a sleeping bag. I figured she'd have at least two of them in her suitcase. So I knocked on the door between our rooms and asked the obvious—"Scully? Have you got anything I can wear?"
"Do you and Scully often share clothes, Agent Mulder?"
Damn. Busted. During my clothing fiasco, Skinner had made off with Scully's room. No funky T-shirt with National Wildlife Federation logos tonight. Meanwhile, I was standing, pretty much damp and half-naked, right in front of Walter Skinner, the object of most of my overage wet dreams. He tossed me one of his own shirts, a black T-shirt that was only about two sizes too large, which I pulled on gratefully. The air conditioning was blasting cold enough on my damp skin to play hell with my nipples…and I wasn't sure if Skinner was checking me out or if it was my imagination working overtime. I invited him to join Scully and me for our usual room service picnic in my room. He turned me down, other plans…having the SAC filleted and grilled over charcoal with fresh lime juice and cilantro was my guess. I didn't know whether to be sad, or to be relieved. I was already in his clothing; did I really want him sitting beside me on a bed, munching his way through…ribs? Corn on the cob? Corn dogs? Celery stalks? Blue raspberry ice pops? It seemed like a pretty bad idea, especially if I got carried away in front of Scully…maybe it was a good thing he was dining elsewhere. Imagining Walter Skinner's lips surrounding that ice pop made me glad my sweats were pretty loose.
I heard him come back after dinner. Scully and I were sitting on the bed I wasn't planning to sleep in, packing away way too much food, looking at the file, talking bullshit, and watching TV. I figured the TV, against the wall between my room and Skinner's, would drown out conversation. "Scully, I have a problem."
"What now, Mulder?"
"What would you think if I said I was trying to think of how to proposition someone but I wasn't sure how to go about it?"
She blanched. "Uh, Mulder, look, I, well…"
"Not you, Scully." Her relief was palpable. I didn't like that at all—I mean, I didn't want my partner, but it's still a blow to your vanity if someone goes "eeew" at you, and she pretty much had. Still, it made the rest of the discussion just a bit easier. "it's a guy."
Scully just stared at me. "Jesus, Mulder, you do like to spring things on me, don't you?" She sipped at a cup of herbal tea, musing. "You know, that's not exactly my area of expertise. Besides—who down here did you figure is available? I hadn't heard any scuttlebutt about anyone."
"It's not my area of expertise either, Scully. I just figure you know more about guys than I do. And I'm playing a hunch here, Scully. Trust me. Either I'm crazy or he's checked me out."
"Those two statements aren't mutually exclusive, Mulder."
"I love you too, Scully. Come on, give me a break. I need advice here."
Anyway, I finally got her to give me some useful ideas. I mean, they weren't perfect. I had to fix them some. But they were enough to give me a plan. Once I had that, the rest was going to be relatively easy. Or so I figured. Providing, of course, that I didn't just lose my nerve. And that I didn't get killed. The latter was unlikely, but still within the realm of possibility. Even if he was as interested as I thought he was, he was still my supervisor—and the man who invented the phrase "by the book." Besides, even if he didn't kill me, he could still play by the damned rules and say "no". And then I might have to kill myself out of sheer humiliation. If he turned me down, I'd still have to go spend the rest of the trip in the next room, and go back to the office with him. So that left me with one choice only—land him on the first try.
Where I was getting the bravery—or foolhardiness—from, I don't quite know. It might have been from that absolute certainty that Skinner had been looking at me like I was dessert for a minute. It might have been from standing around for over two years drooling on my shoes at Walter Skinner's nearly perfect body. It might have been the knowledge that I was sitting on a bed wearing his clothing with him in the very next room, and that he knew it too. I was going to wind up in bed with Walter Skinner before midnight or die trying. There was one way to crack that regulation G-man exterior; now, if I could just make it work.
Humor. If I could just disarm him, get him to laugh—Walter Skinner laughing just might get me a place in the history books; no one, to my knowledge, had ever caused it to happen. I'd seen him give a sort of mild chuckle at jokes told by other agents that caused everyone else in the room to fall down on their butts laughing. Sometimes, when he was in good mood, he could be seen with the corners, just the corners, of his lips curving up about one degree. The man probably could sit through an entire Marx Brothers movie without expression and then say something like, "Yeah, that was pretty funny" at the end. I, however, was going to do it. Tonight. In the next room. I decided to borrow from a joke Scully had once pulled on me. She'd baited me into falling for an obviously phony case. That was it. I was gonna get him, but good.
I thought. I made notes. I ran a couple of ideas past a hysterically amused Scully. I don't for a moment think I'm the comedian of the century; I suspect she was laughing at me. Who else ever wrote out and rehearsed a pickup? Finally, I threw her out of the room. I knew she'd have loved to see me try it out in real life; she'd said as much. I didn't bother pointing out that she'd probably have paid to watch the followup if it worked as intended. I tried to avoid thinking about the "what comes after" part, actually. I was much better acquainted with the theory than the practice. A couple of fumbling drunken groping and petting sessions over ten years before, a few bi movies I'd seen on video because I didn't have the guts to rent or buy any of the all-male ones, and a hell of a lot of masturbation fantasies involving either Alex or Skinner didn't exactly make me the voice of experience here. I had experience with women, but that wasn't quite the same thing. I knew this much—don't use your teeth when you go down. Phoebe'd gone to bed with me one night after we'd had a fight earlier, and she took her side of it out on me during a blow job. Beyond that, things were a little more doubtful.
I knocked on the connecting door, which I discovered he'd locked, and waited. After what felt like an eternity but was probably thirty seconds at most, the door opened. I nearly hit the floor. Skinner was in a T-shirt exactly like the one I'd borrowed, but instead of being somewhat loose, as the one I wore was on me, this one was nearly stretched to the limit over the pecs I'd nearly slobbered on in the Bureau gym dozens of times. And he was wearing gym shorts. The really little ones that you can get away with swimming in if you're wearing a jock. The only thing worse would have been spandex biking shorts; I'd have thrown my plot out of the window and just lunged if he'd been wearing those. I tried remembering to breathe.
"Mulder, what can I do for you?" "A moment of your time, sir. A case has just come to my attention and I'd like you to review a 302 so that I can investigate further." I waved a folder in his face, hoping to look convincing. He looked slightly distressed. Good. He thought I was going to ruin his evening with a pile of paperwork at eleven at night.
"Give me the gist of it," he nearly growled, looking like I'd just offered to take him to see a Reticulan landing site.
I propped myself against some fancy hotel furniture, the kind you wish you had in your own home but you can never find it in regular furniture stores, and prepared to brief him just the same way I'd run it past a convulsing Scully. "It seems that members of the local artisan population have been experiencing a peculiar nocturnal phenomenon, sir. It seems that they go to bed with work orders for luxury goods to be filled the following day. When they come into their shops the next morning, they're finding the work already done for them."
"You're suggesting that someone is breaking in and doing the work for them?" Oh, yeah, he was hanging on to every word I was saying. That, or he was staring at something I was doing that involved my fingers and the waistband on the sweats, a couple of inches above what I hoped to God he thought was the promised land. I checked again. He was staring. He was utterly transfixed, in fact. I've never seen anyone in my life try so hard not to look at something.
"Why is the FBI interested in this? What crime is being committed here?" Funny he should ask. Is sodomy still on the books in the state of Missouri? I'm not sure about that, but there was a serious attempt going on in that room. "Mulder. Those artisans—what do they do?"
"They're shoemakers, sir." He was catching on. He was still going to lose it when I hurled the punchline.
"And you suspect…?"
"Elves, sir." My best straight-line delivery, the one I'd used on Tom Colton about Reticulan blue-plate specials.
A moment of total silence. For one second, I thought the forces of the Universe were about to send down lightning and slay me on the spot -I'd obviously failed miserably. Was my will in order? Had I left my porn collection to Frohike like I'd promised? Had I remembered to appoint Byers as caretaker of my tropical fish? I was certain I'd better die now, because I didn't want to deal with the suffering I'd endure eternally for blowing this.
Then—it hit. Sort of like the way a hailstorm hits on a beautiful summer day and you can't think where all that ice is coming from. Uncontrollable laughter coming out of Walter Skinner's mouth, from all they way down in his chest. I wished I'd had a video camera to prove it was possible. Down on the bed, pounding the mattress—hell, he thought it was funnier than I did. I suddenly thought about the Monty Python routine about the fatal joke that killed anyone who read it because they died laughing, and I started giggling myself.
"You're a lunatic, you know that?" He was finally able to talk again.
"Yes, sir, I've been told. Of course, I have official paperwork that says I'm not actually crazy, which is the benefit of spending a weekend in five-point restraints." Well, I thought it was a good line. He didn't. I guess his remembering what had happened there was an accidental bucket of cold water; I'd gotten over the whole thing, but I didn't realize how sensitive he must still have felt about what he'd done back then. Hell, if I'd 've been him I'd have done the same thing. I figured I'd better bring it back around to the part of the routine he'd liked. "So, does that mean you'll sign the 302?"
"Mulder—let's try something new and different—tell me, in very small English words, what you're doing here, spinning me this line of bullshit at…," he checked his watch, "11 pm?"
Shit, hand me the gun. I figured I must have blown it. Some line from a poem I'd been force fed at Oxford, it must have been Shakespeare, about the joys of death popped into my head. No point bullshitting -dead is dead. I decided to 'fess up. "I'm trying to seduce you, sir. But you're not being too helpful."
"I can't even begin to imagine what kind of response you were hoping for when you start a seduction with a request to investigate elves." Skinner got up and crossed the room to the connecting door. I'd hoped for him falling at my feet, I wanted to tell him. I'd nearly gotten it, too; if he'd been standing closer to me, he would have collapsed right there when he started laughing. "I'm very flattered, but it's impossible…".
Ha. That line was canned, wasn't it? I had an edge. I was out of my standup comic mode now; I'd just heard something that reminded me of an old interrogation concept. Stock answers can be thrown by the right responses to them, since the other person isn't thinking. The ball was back in my court, and I'd just grown a foot taller. "It's not impossible, sir, just highly improbable."
"It's against regs; it makes us blackmail targets—we might as well invite your Cigarette-Smoking friend to watch; it's insane; and what makes you think I'm interested in you?"
For five thousand dollars and a new car…that was entirely the wrong -or should I say right—order. He wanted this, all right, and I still had a chance at it. "Because if you weren't, that would have been the first—and only—reason you mentioned." A psych degree does have its uses.
Skinner slumped against the edge of the door. "Shit. Mulder, this isn't fair. I can't say yes. You know that."
"Yes, you can." Hell, you only live once, and I had Walter Skinner pretty much where I wanted him. I wasn't sure of a lot of the practical application of my interest, but I could figure out how to do the next move with no trouble at all. I reached over, pulled his face right up against me, and went for broke. I had my tongue in his mouth, his hands were in my hair, and I was ready to come in my pants. For half a second I thought it was Christmas.
Now remember, I'm the only law enforcement officer in the world who gets shot by his partner when he corners the bad guy. I'm the only human being on this planet who runs out of gas in the middle of the Antarctic. I can blow anything if I try hard enough. Which explains why I reached up to this gorgeous sonofabitch who was standing close enough for me to feel that he's got a titanium hard-on under his shorts, trying to get him close enough for a full-body meld, and managed to hit him just about full-force in the glasses. I've gotten hit in the glasses. The balls aren't the only place you can catch someone hard enough to stun them. Glasses into the face will do it every time. Where the hell was the nearest gun? I was ready to shoot myself without any help from Modell.
I've been told that the "clumsy helpless guy" routine gets some women turned on. It must work on some men too, because rather than throw me out the door at this point, Walter took off his glasses—probably a self-defense tactic—and grabbed me. Come to think of it, that might also have been self-defense. Anyhow, he grabbed me, told me to shut up—I must have said something stupid, which would be predictable for me—and kissed me hard enough to induce serious brain damage from oxygen deprivation. The only part of my body that wasn't turning to Jello was hard enough to perform some of those crazy stunts I've heard about Hindu fakirs doing with them. I'd just about decided that it was Christmas and my birthday put together when Walter decided to ask me just what I didn't want to answer.
"Have you ever done this before?"
"Kissed someone? Or seduced my boss?"
"Ever made love to a man?" I'm almost as good at "sheepish" as I am at "clumsy helpless guy." I think I actually blushed. I decided that if he told me to be a good boy and go home, I'd kill him first and then shoot myself just to avoid explaining at the hearing. Fortunately for my dislike of committing homicide on anyone but Alex Krycek or Cancerman, Walter must have liked "sheepish" nearly as much as he liked "clumsy," because he just looked at me, grinned, and announced, "You're gonna love this."
One thing I'll tell you—the man has never lied to me about anything that mattered in the long run. I don't even remember how we got naked or wound up in bed. I don't even think I knew my own name at the time. I know I was having a religious experience, because I think I was speaking in tongues. I'm surprised hotel security didn't show up to find out what all the noise was about. If this was what sex was supposed to feel like, I wanted my money back on the past twenty years, because all the rest of my experience had obviously just wasted my time. I'd heard the phrase "incoherent with lust," I'd read it in the occasional porn novel, but if you'd asked me what it meant, I wouldn't have been able to tell you before that evening. Walter was doing things to me that I'd never even known to imagine—and admitting that when you're over 35 and have a lot of porn under your belt is damn embarrassing.
Nipples. I had no idea about nipples, you know that? Not men's, that is. Women's, yeah. Women's are pretty nice; I'd already figured that much out. But I didn't know about mine; I guess Phoebe and Diana didn't know, either. I almost hit the ceiling when Walter leaned down and started working on them. I'd never felt anything like it, and he didn't show any sign of quitting, either. It was…incredible, and I was hard as a rock, and I wanted to come, but I couldn't. I kept trying to grind myself into him, to get some kind of friction going to get me off, but all Walter'd do was back off, grin, and go, "not yet." I'd have begged for mercy if I could have made any intelligible sounds, but I just kept moaning. Finally, he moved down and started nibbling his way down my chest. I didn't know about navels, either—anyone's. Walter must have gotten some kind of really advanced sex ed class, was all I could figure—not that I was doing much figuring at the moment. I just flailed around like a carp on a hot rock and hoped that you really couldn't die from too much of a good thing.
I was waiting to see what happened next; I'd figured Walter was going to move down a few more inches and start working on my cock. Wrong…I was over on my stomach so fast I didn't even know I'd turned over. Hands working over my shoulders, my sides, kneading at my ass. God, Walter's got these incredible hands. Grip strength like nobody's business, which must be from gripping barbells…and then my body suddenly figured out that yeah, I was ass-end up with a guy hung like a mule, because he's just damn big everywhere, he is…and it just must not have been as into the fun as I was, because I tensed up and nearly flipped out, probably scared about the sudden thought of not only my first time, but, well, like I said, it wasn't small. I felt Walter slide the hands back up and start working on my shoulders again. "Mulder. Relax. We're not going to do that tonight. We're not going to do anything you don't want to do."
"I trust you." And I did.
"I know. But we don't have what we need and there's a lot of fun to be had yet. Some other time," he promised, and he was nibbling his way down my spine all of a sudden, and then…I screamed. I must have. I can't not have. Believe me, I'd never been rimmed before, and let me tell you, if I had been, I'd have known. Nerve endings I didn't think my body had were showing me just what I'd been missing all this time, and I suddenly realized, really clearly, that there was a reason so many guys wanted to be on the bottom. Because it was fantastic, I couldn't keep still and I'm really surprised I didn't hit Walt by accident again when I think about it, and it…just…wasn't…enough. Not enough to come, even though I was grinding into the sheets like crazy, and too much at the same time—between the rimming and his working over my balls, I was fucking overloading on sensations.
When Walter finally nudged me back around and went down on me…jesus. I'd had blow jobs before. At least I'd thought that's what they were. Getting head from a guy, or at least from Walter, was a totally different thing. Phoebe had certainly never looked at my cock like it was the most incredible thing in the universe, and I'm still amazed she didn't disinfect it first and get up to gargle immediately afterwards. Diana—well, I can lose an erection just thinking about Diana's talents in that department. A few dates here and there had been more enthusiastic than Phoebe, more skilled than Diana…but nothing like this. When I finally went down on him I realized what it was…you know what you like, and you do it to your partner. Women don't know how it feels; they don't automatically know about that ridge underneath, or the spots right in front of and right behind the family jewels, or…well, the good stuff. You have to be on the receiving end to know how it feels. I came, and I came, and I'm still not quite sure I didn't pass out for a second there. And the only thing I could think was, hey, I want to do this to Walter, I want him to feel like I just did.
I won't pretend I was great at what I was doing. But he wasn't stopping me, and he wasn't complaining, so I mustn't have been too godawful…or else he had the patience of a saint, which is entirely possible. But the sounds were encouraging, and the way he kept wriggling and squirming, so I figured I'd keep going. Walter Skinner, the most poker-up-his-ass man I'd ever known at the office, was a fucking wild man in the sack, and I liked it. I was even enjoying the apparent contradiction, sort of like when Clark Kent rips his shirt off.
He tasted amazing, Sharp, sort of citrusy, under a coating of salt from the way he'd been sweating. Then I made it down to his erection. No doubt about it, I definitely liked guys, because right then I'd never seen anything in my life I wanted more than that cock. I didn't even worry about what I was going to do with it when I got my mouth on it; I just figured I'd make it up as I went along, as long as I got hold of it. Musk, and more salt, over satin skin, over steel. Whatever I was doing with my tongue was working, I figured, because Walter was all over the bed. I knew I'd driven him crazy in the past, but he'd never liked my doing it before. Of course, he was usually yelling bloody murder at me those times, not moaning for me to suck him harder.
I wasn't quite ready for it when he came. Not a big deal, I guess, but it startled me. I didn't gag—actually, I missed a fair amount of it, and I got to amuse myself—him, too, I think—licking it off of him. Mildly salty, slightly bitter, warm…I'd tasted my own, off and on; it was definitely more fun going for his. Yeah, I wanted to do this again; I just was really worried that I might have been terrible and he'd never want me to try. I guess I shouldn't have worried. When I crawled back up, he grabbed my face in both of those huge hands and practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on me that suggested that both of our lives depended on it.
He was sprawled across the bed, apparently taking up most of it, even for a king sized one; I was up against him now, with my head on his shoulder, my arm across his chest, really pretty comfortable and just about ready to fall asleep right there. Then I thought better of it. The morning—now, that could give awkward a whole new meaning. I hoped it wouldn't…I could handle this again the next night—if he didn't come down with second thoughts about boffing me. Shit, what if he just wanted a one-nighter…He must have sensed my sudden discomfort.
"Something wrong?"
"I—I was jut wondering. Maybe I should get back to my room?" That sounded a safe way to express my sense of "mess."
He pulled me tighter against him. "Only if you want to disobey a direct order, agent." Good answer. "You. Are. Not. Going. Anywhere. Understood?" He chuckled, a sort of deep, throaty sound that made me want to do him all over again against the knowledge that he'd hardly be ready to go for it again already.
"Yes, sir." I snuggled in like a heat-seeking missile. Not that it wasn't too damn warm around the place already, but no way was I letting go. Not on your life.
"I don't know about you," he told me, talking into my hair, "but I need some sleep. And you and Scully have your hands full tomorrow. Let's crash." Kisses in my hair, another bear hug. Yeah, I could get used to this. More than that, I wanted to.
Horrible, horrible sounds…then Walter picked up the telephone receiver, rolling over me in the process. "Yeah…thanks." He slammed it down, grumbling. "Damn wake-up call." Then he looked at me. "Morning, Mulder. Welcome to the land of the living."
I looked up at him hovering over me in the bed. One thing about being bald—your hair looks just fine in the morning. Walter looked pretty fine all over to me, to tell the truth. "Time to get up?"
"I don't know about you," he grinned, "but I'm already up." Thanks to whatever invented human biology for the morning erection.
By the time we were done waking up properly and showering together, it was clear we were going to be late for breakfast. Scully would be waiting for me, if not for both of us, probably grousing at her cooling coffee. We came down to the coffee shop twenty minutes late, together. Scully looked irked for a moment, then took a good look, and just made this teeny little tight-lipped smirk into her coffee cup. I knew I'd hear about it from her later, because Walter had this shit-eating grin that he apparently didn't realize he had. Scully and I were talking; he seemed fairly distracted. "So…," she interjected, "sleep well, Mulder?"
"Yeah, Scully. You?"
"Apparently not as well as you did. Pass the sugar?"
"You didn't say please, Scully." I handed it over.
She snickered as she took it from me. "So that's what you're into? I never knew." I turned and looked—Walter was still in another galaxy; I hoped the Reticulans didn't find him and take his liver. At least he wasn't listening to us, thank God. He's cute when he's completely distracted. I'd never noticed that before. I was mildly distracted myself, wondering where the nearest drugstore was—I figured I needed to pick up condoms and lube for that evening.
How the hell were we gonna keep this going back in DC? I didn't know, but damn all if I was letting this drop when we got back. Judging from Walter's expression, that made two of us.
end