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Fox Mulder recognized his problem: at the heart of it all he was a true fucking romantic, perhaps one of the last ever made, and it never amounted to a single thing. He tried to solve every problem with super-colossal gestures, Real Love from Outer Space, and it only tore equally large holes in his psyche. In his heart.
So for this problem. For this problem, he decided to take another path. It was time to learn from his mistakes.
His approach was much safer than that of his contrarian partner. He wasn’t going home with anyone, and no one was coming back to his room with him. If things went right, no one even had to leave the bar. He was just that desperate. He wanted that thing he’d refused himself for so long — even just a taste of it, the T.V. dinner version as opposed to the home cooked meal. When was the last time he’d even had a home cooked meal?
What killed him was that he knew she would ache to see him now. A shadow had passed over her face when she watched him slip out of his motel room, eclipsing that grim recognition on her half moon face. What a little hypocrite. Jealous streak a mile wide, couldn’t even look at him when another woman committed the awful crime of shooting a smile his way, but of course it was her life, it wasn’t about Fox Mulder.
He ached, too. He ached for her in ways and in places that shouldn’t have been possible. In fact, it was so encompassing and insurmountable he’d decided to himself it truly was impossible.
And now she had to go and make it real.
Liquor was never his vice. Growing up with an alcoholic father and at least a quarter cup of common sense, he knew all too well what that meant for his neurological makeup, what could happen if he drowned one too many problems in the comfort of a bottle. But tonight, well, tonight he would live a little! C’mon, Fox, don’t you have a life? Does it always have to be work work work for you?
Couldn’t even... enjoy his fucking vacation. Scully had to... she had to...
Despite the rage that thrummed in every heartsick rush of thick drunk blood, he knew when to be gentle, knew when to be kind. So out of kindness he found someone who was just as upset to be in this bar as he was. Someone who clearly didn’t want to be there, either
Someone who didn’t want his name anymore than he wanted hers.
He didn’t have much of a type beyond intelligent and attractive and, very unfortunately, bad for him. He was particularly single-minded, prone to obsessing over what was right in front of him. His expectations for a romantic partner would fit on a post-it note, were he to write them down, and in some incomprehensible, Lovecraftian-horror type way he understood that a majority of what he’d write might be misconstrued as a love letter to his partner in the F.B.I. There were many people in the bar who could have fit the bill. Perhaps he’d chosen the woman he had because she possessed that specific allure: the red lips, the stacked heels, the flushed sweetheart curve of her cleavage in a silk blue dress. She was raven-haired, but that didn’t matter. She was only a few inches shorter than him, but that didn’t matter. She smoked, she drank dark liquor, her laugh was deep and wounded and it made him feel better, at least for the moment. She was content to play the role of the temptress, knowing perfectly well he would return to his home and blame all of his actions on her. Because unlike Scully, this woman’s life really didn’t have to factor in Fox Mulder. He was nothing to her. And she was nothing to him.
After enough small talk -- he was an entirely different person at this point, who’d grown up in an entirely different town, and had a perfectly reasonable job in public accounting -- there then came that lull in the conversation. And that lull always meant the same thing, didn’t it?
Do you want to get out of here?
He was thinking car, but she did him one better by dragging him to the bathroom, and was it worse that he thought of her? Was it worse if he wondered -- would she do this? With him? It was easier if he forced himself to think the worst of her. No, never in a million years. She was frigid. She was stone-cold. He wasn’t a fucking psychopath so she’d never deem to lift her skirt for him. The old adage drunken words are sober thoughts never quite applied to him. He’d hate himself for his thought crimes in the morning.
His brand new acquaintance dragged him down by the tie and kissed him, hard enough to bruise, bit him hard enough to draw blood. Fuck yes. This was exactly what he wanted. His intention had been to let her set the pace -- he wasn’t going to get rough with a perfect stranger, he wasn’t that kind of asshole -- but she was way ahead of him, every goddamn step of the way, and that was another painful little reminder. Being miles ahead of him always made it onto that little post-it note of his.
He sucked her tongue into his mouth and groaned with relief at finally being touched by a woman who wanted him after going so long without. God, it felt good. Life wasn’t always pain and sacrifice and lack of sleep and lack of love. It was also this. The tight, hot, impermanent love of a woman, who’d let you bend her over a sink and hitch her dress over her hips and fuck her so hard her nose smashed against the mirror. He didn’t slow down when that happened, she wouldn’t let him, so he drove his hips deeper, felt that don’tgodon’tgodon’tgo involuntary clutch of her soft wet cunt and let himself mistake it for paradise.
When she said “Harder,” he gave it to her harder, because he respected a woman who could actually tell him what she fucking wanted. When she said “Faster,” he went faster because he was braindead and had no other choice. When she said “touch me,” he did, slipped his hands between her thick thighs and pinched her clit between his fingers, because if he couldn’t make the other woman come then what kind of revenge was this?
And come she did. He felt the telltale death grip of her pussy, contracting much like a beating heart. He pulled out, not even all that sure of his own intentions, and hastily removed the condom. He roughly jerked himself off until streaks of his cum painted the skin of her lower back, right above her ass cheek.
His brain wouldn’t even give him enough time to appreciate the afterglow or the sight of ejaculate spilled out over her pale flesh. While he stood there and winced at the headache forming deep in his skull, the perfect stranger cleaned herself up, stepped into her panties, and left him there alone.
His feelings were everything he knew they would be and everything he hoped they wouldn’t. Sitting in his car, a consuming shame followed him all the way back to the motel. He was too tired to get to the bottom of what it was, exactly. Sex with strangers never made him feel all that great to begin with. Maybe it felt something like infidelity, and he was certainly less angry with Scully than he had been a few hours before, but it felt even deeper than that. It was like the world shared in his shame, too, and he was carrying its entire weight.
He parked in front of their rooms and sat by himself, looking in the rear-view mirror. Lipstick branded him from his nose to his neck. It made him think of how Scully had looked... after... the bruises. The dark, purpling bruises, so painful, too dark to be covered with her makeup. Made him think of the way she winced when she moved her back. His violent urge to show her tenderness had been masked by cruelty and his own ego.
The world worked in different ways for he and Scully. She was not him. Her pain would always be different; he just always refused to notice it. Maybe she wouldn’t regret a thing, but he wished, with everything he had, that he could take it back.