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When the bed lifts beside her, her body goes with it, spring-loaded and feral, and catches him before he stands up. His wrist tenses in her hand, and her thumb brushes over his pulse, tries to soothe it, tries to soothe her own.
“Where are you going?” She whispers.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he replies, just as soft. One by one, her fingers release him, stiff and red with her tight grip. Her eyes flutter when his palm covers her cheek, and close when it slips away, when all of it slips away, the heat and the solidity, his body in space.
The spit of the faucet startles her, but when the sound of the shower blends in with the heavy rain, her feet carry her away before a choice is made. He’d left the door open a crack. Open. But just a crack. Pushing through, stepping out of her pajama pants and fiddling with the buttons on her shirt, there’s no steam to combat in the bathroom. She sees her body clearly in the mirror, sees her health and her thick thighs, the verdant glow that won’t leave. She remembers how much has changed.
The water is cold when she slips in behind him. She yelps, and he yelps when she yelps.
“Why are you taking a freezing cold shower?” She hisses, hugging herself and shuddering
“I was saving the hot water for you.” He curses out loud and hurriedly adjusts the knob. And then it comes down just as they like it, on the verge of too hot. The steam rises and carries, and her hair curls around her face.
“Mulder.” She touches his back, so lightly, and he stiffens, and it stings her. “Hey,” she murmurs, slipping her arms around his waist. There’s always so much of him to hold and it feels so good to do it, pressing her cheek to his rigid spine.
When he relaxes, she waits. Finally, after taking a sharp breath, he turns around in her arms and faces her. “Hey,” he responds, his voice breaking.
It’s not right, this man who hides away from her. On his knees, his wet face pressed to her stomach, or the shaking mess of him all huddled into a ball, or the sight of him stalking away and leaving all common sense behind him; she’s used to it, she needs it. They need it. There are thousands of miles in their future that won’t let them feel a thing at all.
Pulling back from him, she reaches for the bottle of travel shampoo he’d brought into the shower with him, uncaps it, and pours some into her hands.
“Bend down,” she instructs, lifting her arms up. He manages a watery laugh and closes his eyes, lowering his head just in her reach.
She takes her time, lathers him up real good and makes sure to avoid getting soap in his eyes. Her nails scrape gently along his scalp and he moans and shudders and presses closer to her, lumbering oafishly, and she has to take a step back to finish up the job. Hot tears slide down her cheeks as she rinses out the soap, and when he opens his eyes again he just looks grateful to see her.
With the shower gel, she washes away desert sand and adrenaline sweat and the smell of death and fear that’s been threatening to suffocate her since the moment she met him in his cell. She notices how his body has changed, too, and it comforts her. When he was at his loneliest, when he was hurting and frightened and carrying the weight of the end of the world on his shoulders, instead of wasting away he had fought, pushed himself, gotten harder, bigger, put himself in a better position to fight back, because she hadn’t been there to fight with him. If only she had done the same.
The soap trickles away down the drain, and her lover could very well follow. He is mush and liquid metal in her palms, hot and malleable, molding himself along her shape and hovering heavy. His swollen cock brushes against her belly, and it lights her nerves up in obscene hellfire.
Oh, god. It makes her weak-kneed, frothy. She freezes when he moves away from her, the sensation so abrupt she wonders if perhaps he’d been inside her the whole time and he just slipped out.
He notices her hesitance, and pauses with concern. “Is this okay?” He asks, tentative. She just now notices he’d popped open the shampoo and had been getting ready to wash her hair.
“Yes,” she draws out.
They trade places, get her wet with the spray, and then his hands are in her hair and her toes curl so hard they cramp and she has to stop herself from toppling over.
“There’s not a lot of this shampoo left,” he laughs awkwardly, scrunching up red, soapy strands with much care. “Want me to go grab yours out of your bag?”
“No,” she gasps, shaking under his hands. Even before they ever even kissed they had been touching all the time. She’d grown so used to it, relied on it. The reintroduction of his hands to her body is so much at all at once, the way a starving body has to reacquaint itself with food.
“Okay, okay,” he shushes her, brushing his lips against her forehead. She wants to tell him not to do that. It’s too much, and when she shifts her weight from one foot to the other her thighs are slick. She squeezes them together, licking her lips and tasting the water and a little bit of soap. A few minutes longer, just so they can get clean.
She hears him pour the shower gel into his hands, lamenting that she hadn’t brought a washcloth in with her. He starts with her shoulders, his large, calloused hands digging in deep, then reaching around to cup and slide down her back. He hums, and she delights in it, and when he tells her to lift her arms she follows dumbly, succumbing to the sheer joy of being around him again, of being together, the universe randomizing itself into an order that could maybe make sense to her again.
Then he stops touching her, and her eyes fly open like the water had turned cold. He’s holding his hands above her chest, uncertain, and it breaks her fucking heart that he could even doubt.
“I pulled you six feet out of the ground,” she whispers, dangerously low. “Because I couldn’t live without you. I gave birth to your child.”
“Okay,” he swallows, cupping her breasts gently. Still, he moves without intention, his fingers slipping and sliding like they’ve never known exactly where she wants to be touched.
Tears burn her eyes again, and she grips both of his hands to pull them closer, and looks him straight in the eyes. “I chose you,” she hisses. “I chose this. I chose us. I love–”
His mouth on hers is a roll of sensation and feeling she is joyous to experience, and yet she is relieved that she’ll only ever feel it once. It crushes her, it swallows her up. If the pain of not having him was too much to take then this, the sudden thereness of him, could deal the final blow. His tongue strokes its clever way into her mouth, and his arms enfold her tightly against his body, and they kiss under the last dredges of comfortable water and live on the salt of each other’s need.
“Dana,” he growls against her lips, then whimpering. “Dana…” She cannot decide who is trembling, whose lack of balance is threatening to take them both down.
“Bed, Mulder,” she demands. Without turning off the shower, they’re ripping open the curtain and stumbling out of the tub, one after the other, and he chases her scent of soap and potent arousal all the way to the bed. She falls backwards and pulls him with her, sudsy water dripping all over the sheets. Her hair clings to her shoulders, his shoulders, it gets between their mouths, and they struggle to part long enough to brush it away.
Inch by inch he eventually gets her near the headboard, rising up on his knees between her legs, and that image of him towering over her will never, ever leave her head. His body is powerful, and this is how she will always want to remember him; dauntless and determined, hers, hers, hers. She spreads her legs, wraps them around his narrow hips, and with one sharp move he’s pounding inside of her, the headboard cracking against the wall with a frightening echo.
Before she knows it she is sobbing, the slip and stretch of his length unexpected and beautifully nostalgic, the fat head of his cock pushing her apart and keeping her open for the barbarous onslaught. She is inconsolable and he’s not any better off, roaring into her neck and the heat and steam trapped between their smacking bodies. His hands. She cannot keep track of him. She has never known him to grope, but his hands are suddenly everywhere, cupping and bringing her breasts to his wet, dripping mouth, fingers digging into her thighs, her ass, moving her legs to position them better, get himself deeper.
He gets one between them, lifting up to allow it the space, and his thumb dragging over her aching clit and his teeth scraping her nipple nearly bring her there, bring her so close. His lips glide over her breast, over her neck and meet her own again, and he murmurs against them, voice hoarse and repentant. Sorry. So sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
“I missed you,” he gasps. “So lonely. So bad.” She relates, partway – she had someone, – she held all the hope and she’d given it away –
“I’m so. Sorry. I– I–” And she’s falling apart again, beating her hands against his back, and he’s shaking his head frantically and licking into her mouth until the words dissolve between them, the guilt and the blame pushed all the way back. That is when she comes, only when the pain subsides for that singular moment. She pretends it could really be just the two of them from now on.
When her cunt spasms around him, he comes to a sudden halt, poised above her in newly resurfaced New Mexico sun. Startled animal, wide doe eyes and utterly lacking all cognitive function, she feels him empty deep inside of her in pulses and pulses. Then there is quiet, and there is bliss, and they hide away in each other.
“I’m so happy you’re home,” she whispers, holding his head to her panting chest. He breaks, is anguished, is furious, is hopeless for the first time in his life, and he lets her put him together again.