Be The Last Around, by JiM (XF)

I am standing under the stream of hot water in Mulder’s shower, letting the water wash over me. My skin feels gritty with the residue of all the secrets I have spoken today. My eyes ache and I taste blood; I think I have bitten my lip.

“Hey,” Mulder says from beyond the shower curtain. I jump, not used to having anyone there, waiting for me on the other side.

Mulder begins to talk and I let the laughter in his voice wash over me, the easy trust warmer than the water, warmer than I have any right to hope for. But there it is and I am too greedy to return a gift given in error.

I woke that first morning in Mulder’s waterbed, warm and rested. I stared at myself in that mirrored ceiling, surprised that I wasn’t caked with grime. I found myself waiting for the punch line. It came minutes later when Fox Mulder walked into the room, plunked down a mug of coffee, then calmly announced that I had one hour before my counseling appointment. The appointment he had made for me with the top psychologist used by the Bureau. While I was still trying to decide between shouting and just hitting him, he kissed me.

I open my lips and let the water stream in, filling my mouth with liquid heat. Mulder kisses like that, like he is trying to fill me with all that I need to survive. He did that first morning, too. It was a first caress, because for all of his brazen innuendo that first night, all he had done was take me home to his apartment, strip me and tuck me into a warm and undulating bed. I fell asleep under his watchful eye.

He rewards me with sex. But he is so blatant about it that I am perfectly aware of what he is doing and so could stop it at any moment. I don’t.

Every time I opened my mouth to snarl that first morning, he kissed me. My coffee was stone cold and we were both breathless before I finally just growled, “Fine,” and tried to yank him into bed.

“No,” he said seriously. “Not now. You have 29 minutes to get there and it’s 17 blocks from here.”

“You’ve met my mother?” he grinned, then his expression softened as he looked at me. “You need this, Walt. Badly. And I don’t mean sex.”

I hate it when he’s right. The same way that I hate the daily sessions with the solemn-faced psychologist whose security clearance is higher than my own and who listens to everything I tell her with the same gently interested expression on her face. She speaks maybe five words to me and suddenly the only voice scraping the walls of that fern-colored room is my own. It pours out of me and I am a lanced wound and I barely survive it, day after day, that emptying.

Then I come home and Mulder finds me here, as he has every afternoon for three weeks, in his huge old claw-footed tub, the water running so hot that it begins to feel cool against my reddened skin. He never asks. But when I step out, finally, it is always the same.

“Yes,” he agrees pleasantly. “Indulge me.” As always, I do. I suffer his gentle ministrations, half-embarassed and half-enslaved by the look of intense concentration in his eyes, the earnest curve of his lips. It is neither paternal nor erotic but some weird mixture of the two, and something more, that leaves my throat aching and my forehead creased as I blink rapidly.

My solemn-faced therapist wants me more in touch with my feelings. If I touch any more of them, I will crawl under the covers of Mulder’s bed and never come out. I do not belong there; I have nothing more than squatter’s rights to claim, but I have nowhere else to go.

That first morning, Mulder showed me a letter requesting four months leave of absence for me from the Bureau, citing personal reasons. I nodded as I read it, appreciated his skill at forging my signature. I was drawing a breath to say or shout something when it finally hit me.

I don’t want to go back. The Bureau certainly doesn’t want me there; my new-found honesty and embarassing penchant for answering any and every Senate query has made me a leper in the halls of the Hoover building.

I am finally at the bottom. Confession has hollowed me out, the truth scouring away anything I have kept hidden and only Mulder seems to see anything left worth keeping.

So I spend my mornings watching dust motes dance in the sunbeams that cut through his high-ceilinged apartment and listen to the whisper of pages as I turn them. Afternoons, I listen to my past whisper out as I turn it over for my silent listener and wait for her to pass a sentence that never comes. Nights, I lie in Mulder’s arms or he sprawls across my chest and I whisper it all again. Mulder passed judgment a long time ago and my sentence is life.

He stands up and slings the dampened towel around my neck. My mouth opens and he answers a question I have not yet asked. “Because I want to, Walt. Deal with it.”

My mouth opens again and he says even more crisply, “Because you want to, Walt.”

“That’s a reason?” I finally get my footing, rare in a conversation with Mulder.

His fingers are moving like a flautist’s down his shirtfront. I skin the steam-limp dress shirt away from him, then unbuckle his belt, stabbing my thumb on the metal tongue. Mulder takes my hand in his and raises the wounded finger to his lips. Gently, unhurriedly, he presses his mouth over the pad of my thumb, lips warm and moist as he soothes the minor injury. I shiver and am in danger of shattering again. Mulder does not care; he seems to like putting the shards back together in whatever new patterns I choose.

“Remember,” he says, as he strips away the rest of his clothing then turns away and steps into the shower, “I intend to win.”

As I hear the water begin splashing down his body, I realize that he already has. There is nothing to do but go and wait for him in bed, so I do. This time when I look up, the mirrors reflect a man who is nearly clean.

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