Primantis n'at
Good day. Ran errands, started with a 2.5 mile sprint. Had lunch with friends I see like twice a year. Cut grass for first time this year... spring has sprung.
(no subject)
X-F is Love Day 3! Videos!
Here are a few videos I've made (3) - if youtube has already blocked any, I've also uploaded them to sendspace, to be downloaded and watched, if you'd like, here: Thanks!
Here are the links:
"Giants" (Bear Hands)
"Tonight, Tonight" (Smashing Pumpkins)
"Last to Die" (Pet Shop Boys)
Here are the links:
"Giants" (Bear Hands)
"Tonight, Tonight" (Smashing Pumpkins)
"Last to Die" (Pet Shop Boys)
phi phenomenon
Title: Phi Phenomenon
Author: melissaisdown
Rating: M
Spoilers: Uh, everything I guess.
Timeline: Any time after The Truth
Summary: Mulder and Scully are in a sexual relationship. A video camera is involved. Sprinkles of substance on top of a confection of smut. (aka) Mulder and Scully make a porno.
*The title refers to the phenomenon (in combination with persistence of vision) which allows us to see a succession of static images as a single unbroken movement, permitting the continuous motion upon which cinematography is based.
A/N: Feedback is much appreciated! Thanks for reading.
-
p h i p h e n o m e n o n
The psychology of voyeur and exhibitionist is simple. Mulder was trying to explain it to her that night. They were undercover in that gated community, posing as an upstanding suburban-perfect husband and wife. They were FBI agents, not actors. Mulder with his Oxford education couldn't help but joke about Scully and her video camera and the roles they were playing.
“You want to make that honeymoon video now?” He quipped. Later that night he tried the same kind of joke, expecting Scully would ignore it again.
“Time to break in the bed. Leave the camera on.”
Instead, she slid the camera off of her hand, laying it on the night stand. She stood, cross-armed and thinking a moment.
“I said leave the camera on,” he said to break the silence.
“What makes you think I haven't?”
“I just watched you turn it off and twist the lens cap––”
“No. I mean ever.”
Mulder sat up, his heart hiccuping at the thought.
“Scully,” was all his stunned mind could get his tongue to articulate. “Really?”
She nodded, the warm amaranth of her lips curving up into a grin. She sat on the edge of the bed. Mulder knew seduction was impossible. He forced his arousal to transmute into conversation and talked to her all night about the paraphilias of the voyeur and the exhibitionist, audience and performer. He talked out of context quoting both Psychology Today and his Adult News magazines.
Scully knew he'd never, but obviously wanted to. Too much was revealed in the crackling timbre of his voice, his pupils dilated in the lamplight. The idea was contagious. She had infected him with this incurable thought: Scully naked on the crest of orgasm, whimpering or gasping and all recorded. He could pause or rewind and worship every frame.
Recurring outbreaks play behind his closed eyes still.
He spent a long time scouring her apartment for some unmarked or mislabeled tape. He would lie about what he was looking for or look when she was in the shower or hospital or their basement office.
There was a time when he didn't know if he'd ever have her and so something tangibly erotic, something visual, something that depicted what he'd always thought about but had never experienced with her would have done more than suffice.
No video was ever recovered though. If it did exist, it was under lock and key in some unsuspecting place, a silo, a safe deposit box. He hoped it was hidden in an old bomb shelter and might survive the end of the world.
-
That was the tease. That was years ago. Now they have more behind them than could fit on any timeline. They're older with less to lose only because they've lost so much. They're living together and content to dawdle, to not push the issue or call what they have a commitment. They belong to each other. Stakes have been claimed, still, it's more than possession. It's fate and irony and they both remember every minute of the long drive, the hurdles and defeats, the bullets dodged and the bullets that went clean through.
They are standing in their kitchen one morning. It's summer where they are and honeysuckle wafts through the screen of their back door. They are happy to be alive most days, and with each other. Despite all of their gratitude for the fresh air and freedom, they are becoming complacent. They are not used to the mundanity that has become their normal. They cannot assimilate to this life. They have passed the finish line but want to keep running.
They run like this:
Standing in the kitchen, pouring black coffee onto their empty stomachs. Mulder studies the lipstick stain on her mug. He moves behind her. Scully in her bare feet, her hair longer, catches his movement in her periphery. That's the agreement they have, to follow where the other leads, to trust more completely than reason should allow. Mulder presses his lips to her neck. She feels the warmth of his breath, like reluctancy, a humid second guess. His hand skims up her back.
“Don't go in today.”
“Mulder, I have to. It's Monday, there's––”
He stops her mid-sentence. She's not put the lab coat on yet and he's caught the zipper of her dress, this navy blue, form-fitting, thin-as-parchment paper dress. And why did she never wear dresses at the FBI? It was always suits and long skirts and shoulder pads. In this dress she's home. She's his.
He has to get her out of it.
The unzipping is slow, like a threat. To be wanted as much as Mulder wants her is persuasion enough and Scully turns around and kisses him, half-wake and a little frustrated she kisses him, keeps kissing him as they move to the couch, their dim living room. His hand wends its way into the dress, his palm against her bare back as he unclasps her bra. With a shrug the dress falls to the floor. He sits and she straddles his lap and they perpetuate the oblivion like a waking dream, like something that's only real when they're together.
After, when she picks up her dress, tries to pat the wrinkles out of it and slips it back on, Mulder decides to ask.
“There never was a tape, was there?”
“What?”
“Years ago. You intimated that you had once videotaped it. This.”
“Oh.”
She slides on one shoe.
“Was there? Is there?”
Silence. She bends to push on the second shoe.
“Scully?”
“There was,” she tells him, looking down. “A long time ago.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Maybe. Does it really matter?”
“Yes. Where is it?”
“I don't know,” she lies. She gives him a peck on the cheek, folds her lab coat over her forearm and leaves for work, an hour late and smiling.
-
While she is gone, Mulder digs through their spare room's closet. He finds a video camera they haven't used in years and a tripod and a tangle of wires and cords. He wonders why he never thought of this before. He wonders if he should go buy a new camera and if Scully will say yes.
-
“You're serious?” Scully asks, after dinner.
Mulder nods. He's squinting, holding his breath, hoping she understands. There is the sexual layer of his request. Yes, he wants to know what he looks like when he fucks Scully, what she looks like with him, their sounds, their movements the whole memorized choreography from a different perspective.
It could be more than that too. Doing this might fix into place all of these transient moments, document this affair that sometimes still doesn't feel real. It would inject permanence into both their lives, lives which have been condemned to uncover truths nobody should know, to live in secret and never stand still. All at once this seemed to Mulder an answer to the question he never thought to ask.
Scully is stammering. She will not say no. The idea is not all that daunting. She has done this before and come out the other side unscathed. She trusts Mulder will not broadcast it. He's never betrayed her that way.
“Why?” She asks, curious.
“I like to watch. The idea of watching you, or us together. It's always turned me on.”
He swallows. Scully looks at him, faint incredulity crossing her face. Her need for a logical reason has always exhausted him.
“I guess I just realized how easy it would be to do this, if you want. To do this,” he adds.
Mulder's imagination made into a high resolution reality. Scully likes that idea. She likes how nervous he is at this moment, how she will always rise to the role of accomplice in any crime he asks her to commit.
“Okay,” she whispers, her nail drawing spirals on the back of his hand.
She gets up from the dinner table and he watches her in astounded relief.
-
The progression is incremental. His hope is a slow build. Like a continental drift, a gradual rearrangement of emotions and desires.
Mulder does buy a new camera. He leafs through the manual and adjusts the velcro of the handstrap until it fits him comfortably. His hand is trembling a little when they begin. The objective tonight is to let the want mount, until it reaches that unbearable intensity, like before they'd ever touched each other, when it was all speculative and internalized and unrequited.
He kisses her to start and she looks up at him. Her eyes say I can't believe I'm doing this but her mouth is hot. His willpower is consumed in the single act of pulling away from her.
The house is quiet. The sound of evening traffic seeps through the half-open windows. There is also the thunder of their heartbeats, the almost inaudible electronic ambience of the camera now that he has pressed record.
“Tell me,” Mulder says, walking backwards, zooming out and focusing.
“Tell me what you think about when you do this.”
Scully's eyes are shut tight. Arousal has punctured her exterior but an awkward stage fright is tightening in her stomach.
“I think about you,” she admits.
“What about me?”
“Your voice,” she answers, because her eyes are still closed and she's suddenly aware of its nasally nuance, of the comfort she's always felt when she hears his voice. It's always been aural asylum, some signal that they had survived.
Mulder strokes the top of her right foot, wanting her to look at him. When her eyes open, she sees him with the camera. His hair's in his eyes. He is in a t-shirt and boxerbriefs, half-hard, his erection a lonely parenthesis jutting against the cotton. He is standing in front of the mirror so that she sees him and she sees herself too, from the midriff up. Mulder watching her watch herself and the reflection of it makes for a strange taunt.
“What else?” he asks.
It's surreal how vulnerable and exposed she feels. It's intoxicating in a way she didn't expect. She bites her bottom lip, staring into the mirror. She sees the flush spread across her chest. Her nipples are darker than she remembers. From bearing his child, she thinks.
Her knees are bent, legs spread conservatively but enough. She lets her fingertips brush the dampness between her thighs and is glad she can't see that, just feel it.
“The way you touch me.”
Her eyes roll shut and she flinches as she begins to tease her middle finger around the outside of her barely hooded clit. She has to start gentle and slow and stoke the fire that's kindling inside her.
Her thumb strokes through the valley of her inner labia. Her thighs tense. A fantasy starts to unspool behind her eyelids. Or maybe it's a memory. A finger pushes into her and then another. Scully moans at the ingress.
“Talk to me,” Mulder goads.
Her head lolls back and she winces, looking at him. She is lost and remembering and hardly even here.
“The way you taste.”
She thrusts, impatient. Years of hypercelibacy and a tacit betrothal to this man meant too many lonely nights, too much time spent like this: her own white knuckles curling inside of her, straining, yearning to be with him.
Now here she is, blushing, out of breath and doing this for him. Doing this with him. She knows her own anatomy too well and finds that spot on her inner wall and strokes it, all maddening repetition in just the right pace.
“I think of how long I waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“For you.”
The words make Mulder want to drop the camera, climb onto the bed, drape her legs over his shoulders and push into her for the eternity they deserve. Fuck her into dehydration, or early retirement.
She's watching his reaction to her words, the lust they invoke, his impossible self-restraint.
She wants to reach for him but pushes harder, inching deeper and imagining the pressure of him inside her, testing her limits, making her tremble.
“You remember that night?” He asks. It's not really a question. It's a trigger. Their first time.
“God, yes,” she drawls. It's the memory she's been feeding on. That night is where she will always go if she can't be with him.
Her fingers are beginning to ache. Scully has brought herself to the edge already. She wants to stay there. She wants Mulder to take her over it.
Mulder is there too, so that it hurts to stand so close to her, to see the beads of sweat glint to life on her chest, creep and fall between her breasts. To smell the faded scent of her perfume, the way it's eclipsed by the perfume of her sex.
“Mulder, I'm––god, please. Mulder,” she cries.
It's getting harder to watch. His cock is throbbing painfully. It feels bruised. It feels trapped. His eyes focus on the viewfinder.
He sees movement in the crimson shadow between her legs; slick noises and soft whimpers underscore the scene. Her hips rise. Her breath catches. Her hand stills. A stifled moan and a long sigh and it all seems to be happening in slow motion. She's there and he's rapt, lightheaded, capturing it with an unsteady hand. He sees the pleasure cut through her, sharp-edged and fleeting and they're both helpless in that moment, bystander and casualty suspended in the experience.
When the tremors subside, she stares at him. Mulder is brooding at the bottom of the bed. Her vision blurred, synapses still firing, Scully takes a deep breath.
“Was that good?” She asks through a wry grin.
“Very.”
She sits up, feeling that sudden awareness of her nakedness that she always feels after sex. The red light on the camera has stopped blinking.
Scully moves to the foot of the bed. She stands slowly, her legs weak with orgasm-aftermath pins and needles. Her arms reach behind his back and she kisses him and just the press of her body against his threatens his composure. He moans in warning and tries to hand her the camera.
“No,” she says sitting back down.
She cranes her neck to kiss the grooves of his lower ribs. She exhales against his abdomen, planting sloppy kisses along an agonizingly eventual trail. Her fingers pull at the elastic of his waistband and finally, finally free his cock from its cotton confines.
She studies it for a moment. The color, the veins and incongruities and pulse in it. Pearls of pre-cum have teared at the tip. The droplets are their own aesthetic. They roll onto her hand when she touches him.
A few deliberate strokes and she takes him in her mouth. Mulder lets out a jagged whisper of a breath. It ends in a quiet whine. One hand combs through her damp red hair. The other presses record.
The whole world narrows, idles and stops in the furnace of her mouth.
There is this pattern that only Scully's tongue has ever found. Half-circles, whole length, throat open, lips tight.
Mulder throws his head back and stares at the ceiling. The sight of his cock disappearing into her mouth, that mouth that for how many years justified too many counterpoints, demanded scientific explanations, always insisted she was fine, that mouth that it took seven years to even kiss, that mouth is engulfing him with a fervor, a need that he can only match by thrusting forward and it's too much.
She feels it when the muscles in his stomach tense. He inhales and holds it. His jaw clenches and he looks down at her. Her hands move from his hips to the backs of his thighs. She reels him in closer and he pivots with a groan and it all dissolves into the splatter of sweet heat against the back of her throat and Scully swallowing and Mulder breathing and both of them collapsing into the slow descent back down to earth.
They continue on like this for weeks.
He films and doesn't touch her.
He films her when she doesn't know he is too, soaking in the tub at night or dressing in the morning. He films her sleeping. It doesn't have to be sexual. It's becoming a kind of documentary. It's their love made visible at thirty frames per second.
Scully picks up the camera when she can. She gets him eating breakfast, sweeping the litter of sunflower seed shells from his desk to his office floor and brushing his teeth while reading. For most of the first week she tries to get him masturbating.
She finds him in the shower on day six.
He is mid-stroke, wet hair matted to his face, steam fogging the lens. He ignores the camera completely and concentrates on Scully, the way she's looking at him. His fist starts to move faster.
Scully's nipples sting as they stiffen against her shirt. She fights not to break eye contact with him, but his gaze is starving her of oxygen. Little twitches tug at the muscles of his jaw. The sinews on his throat stand out against his skin. The muscles in his forearm flex; a smiles bends at the edge of his mouth and his eyes close. The signs of his impending orgasm, and her stuck standing here a spectator when she wants him inside her more than she wants her next breath, make her acutely aware that she is wearing too many clothes.
She wants to undress, climb into the shower with him, her palms pressed against the tiles, Mulder bucking until it hurts, until he's spent himself inside her and it's agony to disconnect.
A guttural sob, drowned in the sound of the water and Mulder comes, fierce and final. Scully is watching him, not the camera so it's framed canted and then not at all when he grabs her arm and pulls her into him. He kisses her like they're newlyweds, or this is a homecoming and it's all they can do.
His lust smears against the pleat of her jacket. The water has drenched her hair and washed away her makeup and instead of leading him out of the shower, she lets him pull her all the way in. They kiss like that, believer and skeptic, naked and clothed, voyeur and exhibitionist until the water runs cold.
- - -
The day arrives unexpected.
It is the day Scully can't take this anymore. Mulder inside of her, at night, after work has become a kind of sustenance. She is starving, empty, weak without it.
But mostly, she is flustered.
When she thinks about it, them alone together watching themselves, tangled in the most corporeal embrace: the sheets, the skin, the sounds––she has to remind herself to keep breathing.
She gets home around nine. There is nothing else on her mind. She pours herself two large glasses of wine. The second is half empty when Mulder walks in. He sees it in her eyes, gray-blue with flecks of bronze. He sees that she's acquiesced to the idea. She's come to the same conclusion as him. She wants this.
He reaches for her hand and pulls her to him, like a dance partner, like they're just picking up where they left off in some unrehearsed lambada. He kisses her palm, the bend of her arm below the bicep and at last her open mouth.
“Tonight,” she says, the burgundy staining her lips. Mulder follows her upstairs.
-
What happens next is a kind of carnal car crash. It's all inertia. An inability to brake.
It's the final result of a series of events set into motion the day he turned the ignition and asked her.
They cross the median when they open the door.
They step into the dim haze of their bedroom. It is filled with moonlight filtered through thin curtains and the solace of knowing this is their space. Mulder undresses her the way he always does: with precision and solicitous fixation, like he's uncovering the last sacred truth left in the world.
There is only urgency in Scully's touch. Her fingers unzipping him then frantic in the belt loop of his jeans, pulling them down and sweeping under his shirt. Buttons torpedo to dark corners, lost forever. She bites his lip in a hard insistent kiss and he thinks he likes Scully the most like this, when she's more of a verb than a noun.
The tripod stands in the middle of the room like a third person. The camera is already mounted on it. The hall light is on and the door open, for light. He pulls away from her just long enough to press record.
He returns to her, Scully on the edge of the bed waiting. She's extending an arm and he moves on top of her. There is romance in the movement, the sway and revel. The skin is cool on her shoulders and arms and clavicle. He purses his lips into her suprasternal notch, kisses her chin and shifts.
Mulder deposits his face between her legs. He kisses from the side of her knee to the crease of her thigh. He breathes in the smell of her arousal and lingers until she squirms for contact.
He buries his mouth then, tongue laving, nose pressed firm above her clit. Intermittent slurping and sucking swirl into a suffocating maelstrom and he hums because he knows her body, its secrets and strengths, trip wires and land mines and as good as this feels, all the caged energy about to uncoil, she doesn't want it to, not yet, not like this.
“Mulder,” she pleads, gripping his hand before his fingers can slip in and defuse her.
He starts his journey toward her voice. There's a detour where he concentrates on her breasts for minutes. She can't deny him that. It's a kind of torture, the light feather-like touch coupled with the wet wildfire of his mouth.
She can feel him, hard and seeping at a strange angle near the bend of her knee. A serrated lovesickness stabs at her.
Scully strokes behind one of his ears and he looks up and rises, settling with glossed lips beside her. She climbs onto him and Mulder, with open arms, murmurs something about there always being room on his lap for her.
The weight of her on top of him seems to transcend gravity. There is friction, like the cells of their skin trying to fuse. She grinds against him, commingling their clear but abundant lust. Her hips cant, pushing out the bones to make a well of her lower stomach. She begins to move, tentatively, like maybe it hurts. Or maybe it feels so fucking good she can only react in a languid flux.
The sharp tendons of her thighs stand out from the bandage-white skin. Scully has strong legs. They quiver with the tension of her spread. Between them, she is bare and splayed: her inner lips a blood-red rose. Mulder's hands are behind her, steadying her, cradling the smooth taut skin of her ass. They dip into the indents of her vertebrae, Scully's backbone like a player piano.
She sinks, finally and slowly and bravely and he lets her. He doesn't thrust up, not yet; he lets her glean what she needs. He watches himself looped, disappearing into her body over and over again. He likes to cede control, just watch her lithe frame above him and hold her close.
Inside her he's a dull pulse. He breaks her and reshapes her and complicates her. She is where he belongs, snared in an unhurried rise and fall, clench and release. She is his haven, his last hope. She always has been.
When she bares her neck to him he takes it. His lips move from her jugular to the hollow of throat, her temple and mouth.
The motion of her hips quickens with that connection and he can't help arching into her, almost involuntary, like a drowning man struggling toward the surface for air. He feels the muscles of her walls flutter around him. He grips her tighter, possessive urgency in his fingers as they curl into her flesh.
The bright spark of pleasure that presages her orgasm rises like mercury from the base of Scully's spine. She clings to his body, his chest rasping against her breasts, a day's worth of beard grating the bone of her cheek.
Mulder pushes up with desperate, uneven thrusts, instinctively pulling her hips down as he bucks. She seesaws and swivels, riding him like it's the last thing she'll ever do. She stops suddenly when he's unbearably buried, pressed precise against some invisible trigger inside her. The stutters of her breath catch in her throat. The contractions come in waves. The pitch of uncontrol is contagious, unstoppable as imminent collision.
They resist the reflex to brace themselves against the brutal glory of impact. They let go into it. He feels the heat of what he's held in for weeks flood into her. Scully is still coming and he moves in the endless exquisite squeeze until it subsides and her lips are dragging across his sweat-wet face, finding his mouth and breathing at last.
They are collapsed together, panting, the world static, fading in and out like a quasar. He is holding her tight, protectively. She is breathing in the smell of his aftershave, the smell of their sex, face down against the slope of his neck.
Mulder twists to kiss her. It lands off-center but endearing. This is their love: half wreckage, half reward. Scully's knee bends, adjusting. He squeezes her thigh. His fingers trace the silhouette of her body. She is a crux, a knot of emotion in a quarantine of reason.
He is inside of her, solid and still. They could fall asleep like this, heart rates slowing, the whole scene turning flaccid and placid and cool. Tonight they don't though. A strange intensity hangs from a ledge. The camera is still rolling. So are his hips.
Scully leans backward, onto her hands, her back bowing into a taut curve, a pornographic stretch. This is how she invites his tentative thrusts to escalate. Soon he's lifting off the bed and she's bracing herself for each successive blow, the grind of her squat more weakness than intent. There is just the upward drive of his body, the stinging impalement of it, this unexpected repeat. The sweet twinge is a carving knife dipped in caramel and already she is close again. The undercurrent of her orgasm spreads, rising. There is the languorous build-up, the inevitable overflow until it breaks through her, a demolishing throe. Mulder's jaw is ground shut and his fingers are threaded through hers, sweaty palm to sweaty palm as he follows her blindly with a strangled groan.
The viscous silk of their orgasms spills out of her and onto him, after. It saturates the sheets and taints the night. Scully falls back, at a slant, like a door unhinged. She lies there, sated and shell-shocked and smiling.
An early summer storm is born in the distance. Thunder rumbles. Fragments of the world feel pieced together. After a while, her voice quavering with emotion, she sits up and asks: “What was that?”
“Hmm?” Mulder questions, so close to sleep. He turns his head to face her, opens his eyes.
“Haven't I ever told you I have no refractory period?”
Scully laughs. It is the bubbly laugh she's always had at the shock of his absurdities, the ones that always prove to be truths.
“You're not serious?”
“I am,” Mulder nods. “I mean I have one, but it's unnaturally short.”
“How short?”
“Two, maybe three minutes. Sometimes less.”
“Why am I just finding out about this now?”
Mulder gives a contemplative shrug, looks down.
“I thought I'd lost it. For a while it was gone. I figured I had worn it out or grown an immunity, adapted away from it with age.”
“But?”
“But the last few weeks, it's back again.”
A bolt of lightening shoots through Scully. It starts in her heart, ricochets off her hips and settles at the soles of her feet. The idea of Mulder being able to fuck her to sleep, through an uninterrupted series of synchronous eruptions whets a whole new fantasy. Hers.
She leans into him and places a firm, punctuating kiss to his open mouth. The punctuation of choice? An ellipsis.
He is looking at the camera, the camera capturing this post, post-coital vignette. All the affection and want and understanding. They will fall asleep soon. In the morning he will hold the tape. He knows he will stow it away, watch it for days when Scully's at a conference or lecture or overseas consult. He will masturbate to the thought of making another, to the images of her and him together.
In the morning, he will slip into his boxerbriefs and stretch. He will count the tiny bruises, red blotches, scratches and lipstick stains on his body. He will watch her sleep, residual longing still behind her closed eyes.
He'll be on the edge of the bed when she wakes. The camera will be stored away, the tape on their dresser. She'll see it, ask sleepily, “What do you want to do with it?”
Maybe, Mulder thinks, they can stop running. Maybe they can sit down and just, just.
“Watch it.”
- - - -
Author: melissaisdown
Rating: M
Spoilers: Uh, everything I guess.
Timeline: Any time after The Truth
Summary: Mulder and Scully are in a sexual relationship. A video camera is involved. Sprinkles of substance on top of a confection of smut. (aka) Mulder and Scully make a porno.
*The title refers to the phenomenon (in combination with persistence of vision) which allows us to see a succession of static images as a single unbroken movement, permitting the continuous motion upon which cinematography is based.
A/N: Feedback is much appreciated! Thanks for reading.
-
p h i p h e n o m e n o n
The psychology of voyeur and exhibitionist is simple. Mulder was trying to explain it to her that night. They were undercover in that gated community, posing as an upstanding suburban-perfect husband and wife. They were FBI agents, not actors. Mulder with his Oxford education couldn't help but joke about Scully and her video camera and the roles they were playing.
“You want to make that honeymoon video now?” He quipped. Later that night he tried the same kind of joke, expecting Scully would ignore it again.
“Time to break in the bed. Leave the camera on.”
Instead, she slid the camera off of her hand, laying it on the night stand. She stood, cross-armed and thinking a moment.
“I said leave the camera on,” he said to break the silence.
“What makes you think I haven't?”
“I just watched you turn it off and twist the lens cap––”
“No. I mean ever.”
Mulder sat up, his heart hiccuping at the thought.
“Scully,” was all his stunned mind could get his tongue to articulate. “Really?”
She nodded, the warm amaranth of her lips curving up into a grin. She sat on the edge of the bed. Mulder knew seduction was impossible. He forced his arousal to transmute into conversation and talked to her all night about the paraphilias of the voyeur and the exhibitionist, audience and performer. He talked out of context quoting both Psychology Today and his Adult News magazines.
Scully knew he'd never, but obviously wanted to. Too much was revealed in the crackling timbre of his voice, his pupils dilated in the lamplight. The idea was contagious. She had infected him with this incurable thought: Scully naked on the crest of orgasm, whimpering or gasping and all recorded. He could pause or rewind and worship every frame.
Recurring outbreaks play behind his closed eyes still.
He spent a long time scouring her apartment for some unmarked or mislabeled tape. He would lie about what he was looking for or look when she was in the shower or hospital or their basement office.
There was a time when he didn't know if he'd ever have her and so something tangibly erotic, something visual, something that depicted what he'd always thought about but had never experienced with her would have done more than suffice.
No video was ever recovered though. If it did exist, it was under lock and key in some unsuspecting place, a silo, a safe deposit box. He hoped it was hidden in an old bomb shelter and might survive the end of the world.
-
That was the tease. That was years ago. Now they have more behind them than could fit on any timeline. They're older with less to lose only because they've lost so much. They're living together and content to dawdle, to not push the issue or call what they have a commitment. They belong to each other. Stakes have been claimed, still, it's more than possession. It's fate and irony and they both remember every minute of the long drive, the hurdles and defeats, the bullets dodged and the bullets that went clean through.
They are standing in their kitchen one morning. It's summer where they are and honeysuckle wafts through the screen of their back door. They are happy to be alive most days, and with each other. Despite all of their gratitude for the fresh air and freedom, they are becoming complacent. They are not used to the mundanity that has become their normal. They cannot assimilate to this life. They have passed the finish line but want to keep running.
They run like this:
Standing in the kitchen, pouring black coffee onto their empty stomachs. Mulder studies the lipstick stain on her mug. He moves behind her. Scully in her bare feet, her hair longer, catches his movement in her periphery. That's the agreement they have, to follow where the other leads, to trust more completely than reason should allow. Mulder presses his lips to her neck. She feels the warmth of his breath, like reluctancy, a humid second guess. His hand skims up her back.
“Don't go in today.”
“Mulder, I have to. It's Monday, there's––”
He stops her mid-sentence. She's not put the lab coat on yet and he's caught the zipper of her dress, this navy blue, form-fitting, thin-as-parchment paper dress. And why did she never wear dresses at the FBI? It was always suits and long skirts and shoulder pads. In this dress she's home. She's his.
He has to get her out of it.
The unzipping is slow, like a threat. To be wanted as much as Mulder wants her is persuasion enough and Scully turns around and kisses him, half-wake and a little frustrated she kisses him, keeps kissing him as they move to the couch, their dim living room. His hand wends its way into the dress, his palm against her bare back as he unclasps her bra. With a shrug the dress falls to the floor. He sits and she straddles his lap and they perpetuate the oblivion like a waking dream, like something that's only real when they're together.
After, when she picks up her dress, tries to pat the wrinkles out of it and slips it back on, Mulder decides to ask.
“There never was a tape, was there?”
“What?”
“Years ago. You intimated that you had once videotaped it. This.”
“Oh.”
She slides on one shoe.
“Was there? Is there?”
Silence. She bends to push on the second shoe.
“Scully?”
“There was,” she tells him, looking down. “A long time ago.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Maybe. Does it really matter?”
“Yes. Where is it?”
“I don't know,” she lies. She gives him a peck on the cheek, folds her lab coat over her forearm and leaves for work, an hour late and smiling.
-
While she is gone, Mulder digs through their spare room's closet. He finds a video camera they haven't used in years and a tripod and a tangle of wires and cords. He wonders why he never thought of this before. He wonders if he should go buy a new camera and if Scully will say yes.
-
“You're serious?” Scully asks, after dinner.
Mulder nods. He's squinting, holding his breath, hoping she understands. There is the sexual layer of his request. Yes, he wants to know what he looks like when he fucks Scully, what she looks like with him, their sounds, their movements the whole memorized choreography from a different perspective.
It could be more than that too. Doing this might fix into place all of these transient moments, document this affair that sometimes still doesn't feel real. It would inject permanence into both their lives, lives which have been condemned to uncover truths nobody should know, to live in secret and never stand still. All at once this seemed to Mulder an answer to the question he never thought to ask.
Scully is stammering. She will not say no. The idea is not all that daunting. She has done this before and come out the other side unscathed. She trusts Mulder will not broadcast it. He's never betrayed her that way.
“Why?” She asks, curious.
“I like to watch. The idea of watching you, or us together. It's always turned me on.”
He swallows. Scully looks at him, faint incredulity crossing her face. Her need for a logical reason has always exhausted him.
“I guess I just realized how easy it would be to do this, if you want. To do this,” he adds.
Mulder's imagination made into a high resolution reality. Scully likes that idea. She likes how nervous he is at this moment, how she will always rise to the role of accomplice in any crime he asks her to commit.
“Okay,” she whispers, her nail drawing spirals on the back of his hand.
She gets up from the dinner table and he watches her in astounded relief.
-
The progression is incremental. His hope is a slow build. Like a continental drift, a gradual rearrangement of emotions and desires.
Mulder does buy a new camera. He leafs through the manual and adjusts the velcro of the handstrap until it fits him comfortably. His hand is trembling a little when they begin. The objective tonight is to let the want mount, until it reaches that unbearable intensity, like before they'd ever touched each other, when it was all speculative and internalized and unrequited.
He kisses her to start and she looks up at him. Her eyes say I can't believe I'm doing this but her mouth is hot. His willpower is consumed in the single act of pulling away from her.
The house is quiet. The sound of evening traffic seeps through the half-open windows. There is also the thunder of their heartbeats, the almost inaudible electronic ambience of the camera now that he has pressed record.
“Tell me,” Mulder says, walking backwards, zooming out and focusing.
“Tell me what you think about when you do this.”
Scully's eyes are shut tight. Arousal has punctured her exterior but an awkward stage fright is tightening in her stomach.
“I think about you,” she admits.
“What about me?”
“Your voice,” she answers, because her eyes are still closed and she's suddenly aware of its nasally nuance, of the comfort she's always felt when she hears his voice. It's always been aural asylum, some signal that they had survived.
Mulder strokes the top of her right foot, wanting her to look at him. When her eyes open, she sees him with the camera. His hair's in his eyes. He is in a t-shirt and boxerbriefs, half-hard, his erection a lonely parenthesis jutting against the cotton. He is standing in front of the mirror so that she sees him and she sees herself too, from the midriff up. Mulder watching her watch herself and the reflection of it makes for a strange taunt.
“What else?” he asks.
It's surreal how vulnerable and exposed she feels. It's intoxicating in a way she didn't expect. She bites her bottom lip, staring into the mirror. She sees the flush spread across her chest. Her nipples are darker than she remembers. From bearing his child, she thinks.
Her knees are bent, legs spread conservatively but enough. She lets her fingertips brush the dampness between her thighs and is glad she can't see that, just feel it.
“The way you touch me.”
Her eyes roll shut and she flinches as she begins to tease her middle finger around the outside of her barely hooded clit. She has to start gentle and slow and stoke the fire that's kindling inside her.
Her thumb strokes through the valley of her inner labia. Her thighs tense. A fantasy starts to unspool behind her eyelids. Or maybe it's a memory. A finger pushes into her and then another. Scully moans at the ingress.
“Talk to me,” Mulder goads.
Her head lolls back and she winces, looking at him. She is lost and remembering and hardly even here.
“The way you taste.”
She thrusts, impatient. Years of hypercelibacy and a tacit betrothal to this man meant too many lonely nights, too much time spent like this: her own white knuckles curling inside of her, straining, yearning to be with him.
Now here she is, blushing, out of breath and doing this for him. Doing this with him. She knows her own anatomy too well and finds that spot on her inner wall and strokes it, all maddening repetition in just the right pace.
“I think of how long I waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“For you.”
The words make Mulder want to drop the camera, climb onto the bed, drape her legs over his shoulders and push into her for the eternity they deserve. Fuck her into dehydration, or early retirement.
She's watching his reaction to her words, the lust they invoke, his impossible self-restraint.
She wants to reach for him but pushes harder, inching deeper and imagining the pressure of him inside her, testing her limits, making her tremble.
“You remember that night?” He asks. It's not really a question. It's a trigger. Their first time.
“God, yes,” she drawls. It's the memory she's been feeding on. That night is where she will always go if she can't be with him.
Her fingers are beginning to ache. Scully has brought herself to the edge already. She wants to stay there. She wants Mulder to take her over it.
Mulder is there too, so that it hurts to stand so close to her, to see the beads of sweat glint to life on her chest, creep and fall between her breasts. To smell the faded scent of her perfume, the way it's eclipsed by the perfume of her sex.
“Mulder, I'm––god, please. Mulder,” she cries.
It's getting harder to watch. His cock is throbbing painfully. It feels bruised. It feels trapped. His eyes focus on the viewfinder.
He sees movement in the crimson shadow between her legs; slick noises and soft whimpers underscore the scene. Her hips rise. Her breath catches. Her hand stills. A stifled moan and a long sigh and it all seems to be happening in slow motion. She's there and he's rapt, lightheaded, capturing it with an unsteady hand. He sees the pleasure cut through her, sharp-edged and fleeting and they're both helpless in that moment, bystander and casualty suspended in the experience.
When the tremors subside, she stares at him. Mulder is brooding at the bottom of the bed. Her vision blurred, synapses still firing, Scully takes a deep breath.
“Was that good?” She asks through a wry grin.
“Very.”
She sits up, feeling that sudden awareness of her nakedness that she always feels after sex. The red light on the camera has stopped blinking.
Scully moves to the foot of the bed. She stands slowly, her legs weak with orgasm-aftermath pins and needles. Her arms reach behind his back and she kisses him and just the press of her body against his threatens his composure. He moans in warning and tries to hand her the camera.
“No,” she says sitting back down.
She cranes her neck to kiss the grooves of his lower ribs. She exhales against his abdomen, planting sloppy kisses along an agonizingly eventual trail. Her fingers pull at the elastic of his waistband and finally, finally free his cock from its cotton confines.
She studies it for a moment. The color, the veins and incongruities and pulse in it. Pearls of pre-cum have teared at the tip. The droplets are their own aesthetic. They roll onto her hand when she touches him.
A few deliberate strokes and she takes him in her mouth. Mulder lets out a jagged whisper of a breath. It ends in a quiet whine. One hand combs through her damp red hair. The other presses record.
The whole world narrows, idles and stops in the furnace of her mouth.
There is this pattern that only Scully's tongue has ever found. Half-circles, whole length, throat open, lips tight.
Mulder throws his head back and stares at the ceiling. The sight of his cock disappearing into her mouth, that mouth that for how many years justified too many counterpoints, demanded scientific explanations, always insisted she was fine, that mouth that it took seven years to even kiss, that mouth is engulfing him with a fervor, a need that he can only match by thrusting forward and it's too much.
She feels it when the muscles in his stomach tense. He inhales and holds it. His jaw clenches and he looks down at her. Her hands move from his hips to the backs of his thighs. She reels him in closer and he pivots with a groan and it all dissolves into the splatter of sweet heat against the back of her throat and Scully swallowing and Mulder breathing and both of them collapsing into the slow descent back down to earth.
They continue on like this for weeks.
He films and doesn't touch her.
He films her when she doesn't know he is too, soaking in the tub at night or dressing in the morning. He films her sleeping. It doesn't have to be sexual. It's becoming a kind of documentary. It's their love made visible at thirty frames per second.
Scully picks up the camera when she can. She gets him eating breakfast, sweeping the litter of sunflower seed shells from his desk to his office floor and brushing his teeth while reading. For most of the first week she tries to get him masturbating.
She finds him in the shower on day six.
He is mid-stroke, wet hair matted to his face, steam fogging the lens. He ignores the camera completely and concentrates on Scully, the way she's looking at him. His fist starts to move faster.
Scully's nipples sting as they stiffen against her shirt. She fights not to break eye contact with him, but his gaze is starving her of oxygen. Little twitches tug at the muscles of his jaw. The sinews on his throat stand out against his skin. The muscles in his forearm flex; a smiles bends at the edge of his mouth and his eyes close. The signs of his impending orgasm, and her stuck standing here a spectator when she wants him inside her more than she wants her next breath, make her acutely aware that she is wearing too many clothes.
She wants to undress, climb into the shower with him, her palms pressed against the tiles, Mulder bucking until it hurts, until he's spent himself inside her and it's agony to disconnect.
A guttural sob, drowned in the sound of the water and Mulder comes, fierce and final. Scully is watching him, not the camera so it's framed canted and then not at all when he grabs her arm and pulls her into him. He kisses her like they're newlyweds, or this is a homecoming and it's all they can do.
His lust smears against the pleat of her jacket. The water has drenched her hair and washed away her makeup and instead of leading him out of the shower, she lets him pull her all the way in. They kiss like that, believer and skeptic, naked and clothed, voyeur and exhibitionist until the water runs cold.
- - -
The day arrives unexpected.
It is the day Scully can't take this anymore. Mulder inside of her, at night, after work has become a kind of sustenance. She is starving, empty, weak without it.
But mostly, she is flustered.
When she thinks about it, them alone together watching themselves, tangled in the most corporeal embrace: the sheets, the skin, the sounds––she has to remind herself to keep breathing.
She gets home around nine. There is nothing else on her mind. She pours herself two large glasses of wine. The second is half empty when Mulder walks in. He sees it in her eyes, gray-blue with flecks of bronze. He sees that she's acquiesced to the idea. She's come to the same conclusion as him. She wants this.
He reaches for her hand and pulls her to him, like a dance partner, like they're just picking up where they left off in some unrehearsed lambada. He kisses her palm, the bend of her arm below the bicep and at last her open mouth.
“Tonight,” she says, the burgundy staining her lips. Mulder follows her upstairs.
-
What happens next is a kind of carnal car crash. It's all inertia. An inability to brake.
It's the final result of a series of events set into motion the day he turned the ignition and asked her.
They cross the median when they open the door.
They step into the dim haze of their bedroom. It is filled with moonlight filtered through thin curtains and the solace of knowing this is their space. Mulder undresses her the way he always does: with precision and solicitous fixation, like he's uncovering the last sacred truth left in the world.
There is only urgency in Scully's touch. Her fingers unzipping him then frantic in the belt loop of his jeans, pulling them down and sweeping under his shirt. Buttons torpedo to dark corners, lost forever. She bites his lip in a hard insistent kiss and he thinks he likes Scully the most like this, when she's more of a verb than a noun.
The tripod stands in the middle of the room like a third person. The camera is already mounted on it. The hall light is on and the door open, for light. He pulls away from her just long enough to press record.
He returns to her, Scully on the edge of the bed waiting. She's extending an arm and he moves on top of her. There is romance in the movement, the sway and revel. The skin is cool on her shoulders and arms and clavicle. He purses his lips into her suprasternal notch, kisses her chin and shifts.
Mulder deposits his face between her legs. He kisses from the side of her knee to the crease of her thigh. He breathes in the smell of her arousal and lingers until she squirms for contact.
He buries his mouth then, tongue laving, nose pressed firm above her clit. Intermittent slurping and sucking swirl into a suffocating maelstrom and he hums because he knows her body, its secrets and strengths, trip wires and land mines and as good as this feels, all the caged energy about to uncoil, she doesn't want it to, not yet, not like this.
“Mulder,” she pleads, gripping his hand before his fingers can slip in and defuse her.
He starts his journey toward her voice. There's a detour where he concentrates on her breasts for minutes. She can't deny him that. It's a kind of torture, the light feather-like touch coupled with the wet wildfire of his mouth.
She can feel him, hard and seeping at a strange angle near the bend of her knee. A serrated lovesickness stabs at her.
Scully strokes behind one of his ears and he looks up and rises, settling with glossed lips beside her. She climbs onto him and Mulder, with open arms, murmurs something about there always being room on his lap for her.
The weight of her on top of him seems to transcend gravity. There is friction, like the cells of their skin trying to fuse. She grinds against him, commingling their clear but abundant lust. Her hips cant, pushing out the bones to make a well of her lower stomach. She begins to move, tentatively, like maybe it hurts. Or maybe it feels so fucking good she can only react in a languid flux.
The sharp tendons of her thighs stand out from the bandage-white skin. Scully has strong legs. They quiver with the tension of her spread. Between them, she is bare and splayed: her inner lips a blood-red rose. Mulder's hands are behind her, steadying her, cradling the smooth taut skin of her ass. They dip into the indents of her vertebrae, Scully's backbone like a player piano.
She sinks, finally and slowly and bravely and he lets her. He doesn't thrust up, not yet; he lets her glean what she needs. He watches himself looped, disappearing into her body over and over again. He likes to cede control, just watch her lithe frame above him and hold her close.
Inside her he's a dull pulse. He breaks her and reshapes her and complicates her. She is where he belongs, snared in an unhurried rise and fall, clench and release. She is his haven, his last hope. She always has been.
When she bares her neck to him he takes it. His lips move from her jugular to the hollow of throat, her temple and mouth.
The motion of her hips quickens with that connection and he can't help arching into her, almost involuntary, like a drowning man struggling toward the surface for air. He feels the muscles of her walls flutter around him. He grips her tighter, possessive urgency in his fingers as they curl into her flesh.
The bright spark of pleasure that presages her orgasm rises like mercury from the base of Scully's spine. She clings to his body, his chest rasping against her breasts, a day's worth of beard grating the bone of her cheek.
Mulder pushes up with desperate, uneven thrusts, instinctively pulling her hips down as he bucks. She seesaws and swivels, riding him like it's the last thing she'll ever do. She stops suddenly when he's unbearably buried, pressed precise against some invisible trigger inside her. The stutters of her breath catch in her throat. The contractions come in waves. The pitch of uncontrol is contagious, unstoppable as imminent collision.
They resist the reflex to brace themselves against the brutal glory of impact. They let go into it. He feels the heat of what he's held in for weeks flood into her. Scully is still coming and he moves in the endless exquisite squeeze until it subsides and her lips are dragging across his sweat-wet face, finding his mouth and breathing at last.
They are collapsed together, panting, the world static, fading in and out like a quasar. He is holding her tight, protectively. She is breathing in the smell of his aftershave, the smell of their sex, face down against the slope of his neck.
Mulder twists to kiss her. It lands off-center but endearing. This is their love: half wreckage, half reward. Scully's knee bends, adjusting. He squeezes her thigh. His fingers trace the silhouette of her body. She is a crux, a knot of emotion in a quarantine of reason.
He is inside of her, solid and still. They could fall asleep like this, heart rates slowing, the whole scene turning flaccid and placid and cool. Tonight they don't though. A strange intensity hangs from a ledge. The camera is still rolling. So are his hips.
Scully leans backward, onto her hands, her back bowing into a taut curve, a pornographic stretch. This is how she invites his tentative thrusts to escalate. Soon he's lifting off the bed and she's bracing herself for each successive blow, the grind of her squat more weakness than intent. There is just the upward drive of his body, the stinging impalement of it, this unexpected repeat. The sweet twinge is a carving knife dipped in caramel and already she is close again. The undercurrent of her orgasm spreads, rising. There is the languorous build-up, the inevitable overflow until it breaks through her, a demolishing throe. Mulder's jaw is ground shut and his fingers are threaded through hers, sweaty palm to sweaty palm as he follows her blindly with a strangled groan.
The viscous silk of their orgasms spills out of her and onto him, after. It saturates the sheets and taints the night. Scully falls back, at a slant, like a door unhinged. She lies there, sated and shell-shocked and smiling.
An early summer storm is born in the distance. Thunder rumbles. Fragments of the world feel pieced together. After a while, her voice quavering with emotion, she sits up and asks: “What was that?”
“Hmm?” Mulder questions, so close to sleep. He turns his head to face her, opens his eyes.
“Haven't I ever told you I have no refractory period?”
Scully laughs. It is the bubbly laugh she's always had at the shock of his absurdities, the ones that always prove to be truths.
“You're not serious?”
“I am,” Mulder nods. “I mean I have one, but it's unnaturally short.”
“How short?”
“Two, maybe three minutes. Sometimes less.”
“Why am I just finding out about this now?”
Mulder gives a contemplative shrug, looks down.
“I thought I'd lost it. For a while it was gone. I figured I had worn it out or grown an immunity, adapted away from it with age.”
“But?”
“But the last few weeks, it's back again.”
A bolt of lightening shoots through Scully. It starts in her heart, ricochets off her hips and settles at the soles of her feet. The idea of Mulder being able to fuck her to sleep, through an uninterrupted series of synchronous eruptions whets a whole new fantasy. Hers.
She leans into him and places a firm, punctuating kiss to his open mouth. The punctuation of choice? An ellipsis.
He is looking at the camera, the camera capturing this post, post-coital vignette. All the affection and want and understanding. They will fall asleep soon. In the morning he will hold the tape. He knows he will stow it away, watch it for days when Scully's at a conference or lecture or overseas consult. He will masturbate to the thought of making another, to the images of her and him together.
In the morning, he will slip into his boxerbriefs and stretch. He will count the tiny bruises, red blotches, scratches and lipstick stains on his body. He will watch her sleep, residual longing still behind her closed eyes.
He'll be on the edge of the bed when she wakes. The camera will be stored away, the tape on their dresser. She'll see it, ask sleepily, “What do you want to do with it?”
Maybe, Mulder thinks, they can stop running. Maybe they can sit down and just, just.
“Watch it.”
- - - -
I have begun working on something again...
Hello! It has been a long time since I have posted. Does anyone visit lj anymore? If so, you should know I am working on an X files ff. Never thought I'd be saying that 12+ years after the series finale but such is life. My working title is "Mulder and Scully make a porno" but I promise, there is substance to balance the smut. It is about three quarters done. Will post here and various other places upon completion.
Can anybody recommend XF comms on here or anywhere else that are still active and may be worth postign to from time to time?
Can anybody recommend XF comms on here or anywhere else that are still active and may be worth postign to from time to time?
Imagine This
I don't know if anybody comes on here anymore or if anybody will read this, but feel free to comment if you do. This is orig fic I've been working on for a while. Just putting it out there...
- - - - -
Imagine this: you're an above average guy. You're aesthetically pleasing to the eye. You've forsaken machismo for modesty, what seems like a wholesome veneer. Except it's more than skin deep.
You joined the Navy to pay for school, majored in Civil Engineering then Photography then Industrial Design and finally architecture. Now you're a licensed architect and it's what you've always wanted, to roll up blue prints of stadiums and skyscrapers and know it's yours. It was all your idea.
You're 26. You're renting a house, three bedrooms on the outskirts of the city's suburbs. You thought you'd be happy here. April, May, you were, with your cute-as-a-button girlfriend and your deaf pitbull named Lulu. Then she cheated on you. The girlfriend, not the dog. Things didn't fall apart, because you had them assembled so perfectly together. They fell away. You slipped into an opaque despondency, realizing how few friends you had in this town.
One Saturday night, you and a friend from work plan to go to a concert. You arrive to meet him there, wait outside until 7:59 but he never shows. You go inside anyway, because you're holding your ticket and you have nothing better to do―except apply for that job in Seattle, you remember. In the morning, you will. Now you buy an overpriced beer and resolve to elbow your way to the center of the crowd.
The lights dim and the opening band comes on and by the end of the second song you begin to care less about being alone. That's when you see her. A blonde, sharp as a hypodermic needle, swaying in the kaleidoscopic haze. Her tendrils are damp with sweat and her makeup has melted away; she seems guarded but not unapproachable. You sip your beer a nameless voyeur as another girl leans to whisper something in her ear.
I can tell you what she says because the blonde girl, that's me. Caitlin tells me she's leaving but I mishear her. I nod idly, thinking she told me she just has to pee. Then we're alone together, the outliers of the crowd pushing us closer.
I see you, filling the space beside me, a handsome catch, a sensitive kid. Your straw-pale hair is haloed by the stage lighting and when I turn my head, realizing Caitlin isn't coming back, you smile at me.
An accumulation of chords, some cathartic suckerpunch of percussion echoes, blasts, turning the figures of the band into formless shards. The swarm of adrenaline drenched twenty-somethings we are roar for an encore. I can feel you in my periphery, holding your breath in that lull. Then the din blares back to music for one last set and we watch rapt.
Why here, like this, I think when our eyes meet again. The histrionics of an establishing shot, a common soundtrack to underscore our opening, the pitch and intensity and promise of the most fleeting moment: love at first sight.
Or something else entirely.
We begin talking during that dying cacophony after the last song. In the slow crawl to the door I find out your name is Conor and you think I say mine is Michelle. I don't correct you.
You suggest we get a drink and though I know I look like an asylum escapee, with my hair mussed and my cheeks crimson-flushed, I can't say no.
Into our second hour of talking and drinking, you mention your time stationed in Bahrain. I nod stupidly and without thinking tell you my boyfriend is in the Marine Corps.
A beat passes, tense and contracting like a cerebral charlie horse. I cannot tell but I think you're relieved by the inadvertent admission. Another band we both like will be in town in two weeks. You segue nonchalantly into this topic. Staring at our empty glasses, we agree to go together.
Nathan, my boyfriend, had already expressed a lack of interest in going with me. I dread asking him. His knees are the bane of his years after discharge. Both ACLs have been torn and his doctor is pushing for meniscus transplants. He refuses. Pain is a challenge for him, a duty. He's agony's ambassador. I'm going to spare him standing three hours at another general admission concert for a band he likes less than me. It's not his fault he's become my only friend.
My best friend from childhood, adolescence and until recently, Benna, moved to Florida five years ago. We used to text and talk and see each other when she came home for holidays. She's getting married next spring and I was supposed to be the maid of honor. But I bailed, the way she expected me to, and apologized and retracted my apology and haven't heard from her since.
All life is like that, sacrificing parts of yourself, cutting out and removing people that seem expendable at the time. It's a slow series of amputations until all you can do is remember who you were with them.
You meet me in the parking lot before the next concert. We walk and talk and try to ignore that we have so much in common. We have the same hair color too, and though your features are more chiseled and refined than mine, I know we could pass for siblings.
The looks I get from other women, the one's that assume we're on a date―those looks that ask, 'What is he doing with you?' or reassure themselves 'He must be gay,' those don't bother me. I'm the victor in this picture, regardless of how people perceive us.
There are conversational subtleties in our rapport after the show. We sit and drawl on into the early morning like we've both been in solitary confinement for 25 years. You keep mentioning your big house, with extra bedrooms, the grass you have to cut and the two car garage. I finally confess I'm bored living alone (I actually can't afford it much longer) and we arrive at a confluence. This is how futures form, late at night through tipsy dialogue and with hoarse voices.
Before the week's end, I've moved in with you.
Imagine this: you are an average guy. You have a military crew cut and a thick but trimmed beard. You've met a girl but your hopes don't hinge on her. You feel discovered, comforted, needed, loved and sometimes bored with her.
After four months you ask her to move in with you. She shrugs, freezes, maybe sees a grizzly bear standing behind you. She finally says no but buries it in so much gratitude that it relieves more than piques your suspicion.
One part of you needs to plant roots, knows you could raise a family. Another part is attracted to the openness, the non-exclusivity of this, with her. A few days later she says maybe she will get a roommate. You make a joke about lesbian pillow fights. She doesn't laugh.
You wonder how you got here, with her, of all people. You feel stuck, shackled to this place. You bought this house when you were engaged to your ex and you're stuck with it for three more years. Maybe she's a distraction, a transitory companion, warm flesh to curl up behind when you're afraid you'll forget how it feels. You've grown used to this, half fallen in love with her.
She does get a roommate. She tells you it's a guy and asks if you mind. She's already started moving her stuff in though, and even if you say yes, it won't matter.
You are Nathan and never Nate. Nathan is already an abbreviation for Nathaniel, you explained one night after you had only been dating her a few weeks. She made a joke and a rhyme about syllabic verse. You didn't laugh. Now she never calls you Nate. To your face.
Your relationship is hard to explain. The two of you have a vague history. She met you when she was an undergrad. You served with her friend Adam and were sharing a story about your time at Twenty Nine Palms when she infiltrated your next thought, her hand on Adam's shoulder.
You were both drinking too much that night and what you remember of the sex is graceless, blurry and perfect. It was more than her acquiescing to your aggressive pursuit. It was one night, without even the dimmest echo of ever seeing each other again.
Four years later though, you do. You've always imagined kismet being a collision.
This is more of a tap on the shoulder.
You're standing in the same aisle at the grocery store, trying to decipher why the other seems familiar. It's an anesthetizingly ordinary scene. Tabloids and chewing gum border the check out line. The florescent lights make the chain smoking cashier seem even more wan. You've gotten older.
I know you, is how you initiate, gaping through a long pause, like a shy kid to a pretty girl at recess. She follows you back to your place, makes stir fry and you talk like old friends. Like you know each other. Like you ever will.
The memory of this unsentimental beginning, the strange intersection this was becoming, now makes your sedimentary heart skip a beat. Remind yourself: this isn't a love story. It's an examination of the snares in life, the ones we stupidly set for ourselves, stumble into and bleed out from.
There is no rush into calling what you have a relationship. There is casual sex and rough sex and casual rough sex. There are conversations about the second amendment, your disparate childhoods, how you've never seen a Disney movie. Both of your personalities synchronize eventually. Despite the many firearms you own, she's not nervous around you. You laugh at her punchlines and dissect her long post-graduate days of all work and no play.
I know those long days as well as I know you. As well as I remember this:
It's an early weekday morning. I am dressed, completely. My make up is pressed on, my hair is combed. I'm reaching for my shoes when you come up behind me. Your hips pivot into some primal grind against the clothed cleft of my ass. Your beard grates the length of my neck.
Your hand unfastens my belt, pulls down the zipper.
No, I say weakly when you bend a knee into the back of my thigh, the hips of my pants loose and descending.
Seriously, not now. I have to go to work. My breath catches on the last syllable. I forget how to breathe. You make me forget, with your hand under my shirt. My back curves into a sharp arch.
Mid-air I gasp; you lift me up and slam me down on to the dresser. The mirror bangs hard against the wall. I settle on cold change and loose ammunition. I feel more blindsided than sexy. I go with it. Or I don't. I imagine I have control. I pretend I have a choice.
You ram into me, turgid slippery heat. I meet each uneven jerk. The edge of the dresser is too close. My toes curl in the thin air above the carpet. My thighs clench. Don't fall down now, I tell myself.
This is the worst kind of balancing act.
I writhe and struggle against you. I have a feeling this is what you want. I fight back with the confidence of an insecure adversary. Just as I'm about to collapse off the corner of the dulled oak finish, you pick me up and sweep me onto the bed––more premeditated crime than rhythmic choreography.
The smothering weight of you, backlit by passion or rage or whatever you're feeling, this is what I've loved about you until now. The unspoken, sometimes awkward or timorous but always honest disclosure, of Nathan, of us, together.
Every time I try to rise, you push me back down. I feign resistance and it spurns you; the harder I fight, the more I lose. You can't slow down. Your face is stained a wicked crimson. Sweat streams down your temples. There's venom in the few kisses we exchange. Chlorine gas in your breath.
My own arousal I sustain off the fuel of memories. I try to imagine what you're thinking, if you're lashing out because I've emotionally assaulted you. I imagine I deserve this, the blunt trauma of the vaguely non-consensual. I imagine that we can recover from this, from anything. You come inside of me on the evaporation of that thought, in a guttural slur, livid steam against my nape.
I want you to tell me you love me, or hate me. You lie quiet another five minutes then stand and stagger to the shower without saying a word.
This is the only time this happens. This is the only time your misplaced anger and agony find me in their crosshairs. I tell myself you are just Nathan being Nathan. I tell myself that I know you, but I don't.
I don't know anything.
We are eleven months in to this, whatever it is we have, when you tell me.
We are lying in bed, our sweat cooling. I am staring at your legs and feet when you tell me about Ellie. She is a woman you work with. You have worked with her four and a half years and you're in love with her.
Have you told her? Does she know? I ask, not as appalled as I should be.
No.
Why haven't you said something to her, asked her out...something?
The stakes. I'm scared I guess.
You hesitate.
I mean, the way it's been, it's still a possibility. If I ask her and she says no. Or even if she says yes and it doesn't work out, I've lost that. I'll still see her everyday. She'll be this reminder of my rejection.
At least rejection is something, I tell you. If you never act, never tell her, then it's nothing.
You turn onto your side and face me, considering.
Are you seriously encouraging me?
Yes, I say, sighing. Part of being your girlfriend is being your friend. As your friend, I want you to be happy. If I can't do that for you and she can, I would let go. Let you go.
I don't hesitate to tell you:
Be pragmatic. Be realistic. Don't throw hurdles in front of yourself this way. You owe me nothing.
I want to stop talking, I'm sounding far too removed from my own role here. I sound beneficent, naïve.
Do you really think there's something there? Could you make it happen?
You shrug, smile.
Should I start looking for wedding presents and baby clothes?
You stretch to draw the blinds and put your hand over my mouth and we fall asleep, less than wholly committed and not exactly happy.
In the morning, you're in a strange mood. My encouragement last night stirred in you more suspicion than hope. You are wondering if I have already fucked my roommate. You are wondering what Ellie will be like to fuck, her thin wrists pinned above her, her in your bed, the languid hopeful warmth of her body in your bed.
You want to ask about this big open question mark standing between us. Suddenly we can see other people. Never has a girl been so eager to offer as much. You're sure it can't be all altruism and the 'I just want you to be happy' line I spouted off last night. Women yearn for fidelity. How did you get paired with one who thinks it's fiction? Your mind balloons with nervous fear. You look at me for a second and then look down at your corn flakes. You feel as though I'm nobody special in the larger scheme of your life; you lose your appetite.
At work, things are tense. You approach Ellie, make small talk but never manage the ultimatum. She is your friend and colleague. You respect her. Every day your want for her broadens, grows. It's more than lust. Ellie is brilliant, independent, she has a background you admire and a recent break-up that terrifies you. You've been watching her for years. She was with him then. Now she may not be ready to move on. She may never be ready.
You may never be ready.
I am at work too. I have no infatuation here, nobody to salivate or vacillate over. I am reading The Portable Neitzsche. I want to be like Nietzsche. I want to write a book for all and for none, to say 'Nathan spoke thus,' to contemplate the existence of eternal return.
If I had to live this life again, if it was all just an hourglass turning over endlessly, no matter how miserable the thought of inescapable deja vu, suicide as relief is utterly debunked. The days go on and on. I am bored even when I am busy.
I make notes on my folder.
-Be kind to inanimate objects. They will be there for you long after the people in your life are gone -We're all killing ourselves in some way (and for no reason)
-Eleanors: Roosevelt, Rigby, Nate's
At home things become remarkably mundane. Conor and I wake and go to work, sometimes eat together, sometimes go out. We both know where this is leading. We are meandering toward it. We are old people with Hurrycanes, ironic and ambulatory.
We have become great friends. If we do this, when we do this, that could change.
Neither of us wants a relationship with the other. I think. The mutual attraction is there. I am not in love with him. Love is fleeting though. Even if I were, it wouldn't last. Even though I'm not, I could be. It could come.
There is no angst or tension or expectation between us. We take a shower together sometimes when the hot water is scarce and non-renewable. It isn't awkward. It isn't erotic either. We are like childhood friends who never separated. There is a backstory we feel but never experienced.
It's hard to explain.
One day, after work, we are are outside, arguing about who had the best Halloween costume. The permeating pine chill of fall air fills our lungs. The setting sun is scorching ocher along the horizon. Conor and I are sitting side by side on a dilapidated swing set in our backyard. He reaches for and takes my hand, holding it, warming it. Until now, we've never done this. We've never kissed. He's seen the texts I've gotten from Nathan, overheard our directionless fights, seen him around here less often.
How long has it been since Conor's break-up? Romantic as his heart may be, he's human. I'm not unaccessible, not miserably unattractive. His hand settles on the small of my back as we go inside. We skip dinner. A scene starts to unfold.
We are lying on the living room floor, listening to Transatlanticism and wishing we were in love. Or in something else, lyrically aquatic, swimming instead of sinking in the inimitable guilt we're about to conceive.
His hand runs the length of my arm. His hand clasps mine, our fingers interlaced. Minutes later he's curled fetal, one of his long legs draped over both of mine. His lips brush my temple, my chin. He pulls back.
What's wrong? He asks.
We shouldn't be doing this.
But we are. Three syllables in the crook of my neck.
You want to stop?
I shake my head. My face is clouded with a sad uncertainty, this terminal loneliness we're projecting onto each other. I am in it with him, no matter what words there are.
The title track replays. He is tracing his thumb over my cheek, framing my face in both of his hands. There's an obscene tenderness in the gesture and for a moment I wonder if my heart isn't a rock, a dense mineraloid tethering me to the moment, leaving me paralyzingly insecure and aware of its passing.
Conor is touching me in places he's never touched me before. I reciprocate, gauging the heat of his bare back, the soft ambit of an ear lobe. The room is dark except for the azure expectation of his stare
I hope stays dark forever.
I realize now, here, how unhappy I am with Nathan. I love him, yes. Offered the promise of a future with him? I'd choose this.
We kiss for what feels like half the night. There is a maladroit prostrate dance, our determination to make floor sex less of a dirty carpet-burning grind than it is. Soon we forfeit and stumble to his bed, a capsized cause, the undertow of blue sheets pulling us down deeper. I hold my breath. I cling to him. I close my eyes. I want to pretend. I want to imagine there is such a thing as requited love, to believe that it is real and here and him.
Conor is pulling my hair, our lips crushed together, the collision of our bodies snared in a breathless lapse of time. When I let go, drowned finally in the flood of this want, it's with simultaneous panic and relief. The last breath of air escapes my lungs, the heat of his release spills like tangible regret inside me.
After, he holds me. The room feels cold. He falls asleep first. The bedroom window, frosted in the corners, vignettes the night sky. I see stars in the distance, minute and quivering. I am always seeing stars.
Imagine this: Your roommate is in love with you. Your boyfriend is in love with a Cisco-certified slut he works with.
Scratch that.
You roommate is not in love with you. He's your hostage and his infatuation is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome. Your boyfriend is still in love with a woman he works with. There is an empty feeling when you're with him. You don't want to call it loneliness. You don't want to be that girlfriend, that wife, that mistress suffering this revelation.
You love him and you're sure he loves you in some fragmented, stop-start, half of his heart kind of way.
This should be enough. You want someone to tell you, you want someone to affirm: life is hard and short and sad. Here is someone to bide the time with. A cell mate, an accomplice.
You are living with a handsome, considerate peer. He happens to be the opposite sex. He's the third roommate you've ever had and after four years of living alone, you would not have expected this to be so easy.
Conor's quiet, leaves you your privacy and remembers to put the toilet seat down. He's got scruples and shares almost everything. You split the bills and the rent and the garage. He's single and not looking and you don't blame him. The connections we crave are never worth the pain.
All life is severing ties, then trying to staunch the blood.
Nathan and this Byronic unspoken ordeal has led the two of you to be in an open relationship. You've given him permission to act on his emotions, should he muster up the courage. He, in return, accepts the odds of you falling into the arms of your roommate.
In this way you have infinite trust but no stake in each other.
At work you walk through the halls with clenched fists. When you fuck Nate, you fuck him with clenched fists. It's defensive readiness, a premonition of having to block a punch in the face. It's an attempt to break your fall as you lose your footing and plunge off a self-fulfilled precipice. Don't fall down now.
You will never get up.
The days are long. You spend ten, thirteen, fifteen hours at work. You're a coward, a deserter. You are dodging confrontation, the denouement you know is near.
Nathan was someone you fought not to love. But it happened, creeping involuntary, the slow inertia of empty hearts sinking into the same ravine. This is how you lose him:
You leave work at four. The sky's a hazy slate. It's a long drive and your car heater can circulate dust, but doesn't warm a thing. You think of stopping, turning around. He's not expecting you tonight anyway.
You're knocking on his door. How did you get here? How did either of you get here?
You don't try to bandy words. You tell him you don't love him. You tell him you never did. You lie. The frustration, the cornered, stranded irreversibility of this begins to make you cry. Rivulets wend their way into your hair. You start to feel sick. Why didn't you drink some Pepto Bismol before doing this? Why are you doing this?
I'm sorry, you say. You keep saying it. A sob lodges in your throat. You are choking on your own words. Love drains from you, leaky faucet turned torrential deluge.
You stand there a long time thinking about the word foyer. Nathan is speaking low, almost whispering. You can't hear him over the tirade of your interior monologue. Then suddenly it's darker; the hallway's lost light. He leans in and kisses you on the cheek.
You should go, he tells you.
You turn and step out in to the numb quiet night. Stumbling to and starting your car, you drive away lost. Tears well and loiter in the corners of your eyes.
Forever he will possess some part of your heart. You will never feel safe again the way you did with him. You will always be emotionally anemic.
Weeks pass. Winter wanes then recurs before nature can recuperate.
It's snowing outside, the cottony crystalline kind that seems like it will never meet the ground. You're frozen, blank, inexpressibly abashed. Conor comes in to your bedroom, finds you staring at a blinking cursor. He is not here to console you. He has good news. He got the job in Seattle and they want him to start next week.
Congratulations, you say. Great.
If your stomach weren't empty, you'd vomit.
Conor is gone before you know what else to say. There is no farewell kiss, no goodbye quickie. People come in to your life and stay for the blink of an eye. You should be used to it. You should be detached. You should get a husband and start a family and pretend that makes this less likely to happen again. In the hard vacuum of his departure you try to write, try to channel your melancholy into words. You try to exorcise with prose. But you are not feeling inspired. You are feeling more like a prisoner about to be shanked.
It is a frigid colorless afternoon. You decide to call off work. Maybe you should quit. You walk outside and settle on a swing. There's no snow, no wind just the narrow spines of trees, the dark dead mat of leaves, the hollow echo of traffic, and you, on a solitary swing. You've got your head canted, staring at the ground. The cold air makes it hard to breathe. A silhouette of empty houses is creeping up behind you. You are alone. You have been the whole time.
Imagine that.
-
- - - - -
Imagine this: you're an above average guy. You're aesthetically pleasing to the eye. You've forsaken machismo for modesty, what seems like a wholesome veneer. Except it's more than skin deep.
You joined the Navy to pay for school, majored in Civil Engineering then Photography then Industrial Design and finally architecture. Now you're a licensed architect and it's what you've always wanted, to roll up blue prints of stadiums and skyscrapers and know it's yours. It was all your idea.
You're 26. You're renting a house, three bedrooms on the outskirts of the city's suburbs. You thought you'd be happy here. April, May, you were, with your cute-as-a-button girlfriend and your deaf pitbull named Lulu. Then she cheated on you. The girlfriend, not the dog. Things didn't fall apart, because you had them assembled so perfectly together. They fell away. You slipped into an opaque despondency, realizing how few friends you had in this town.
One Saturday night, you and a friend from work plan to go to a concert. You arrive to meet him there, wait outside until 7:59 but he never shows. You go inside anyway, because you're holding your ticket and you have nothing better to do―except apply for that job in Seattle, you remember. In the morning, you will. Now you buy an overpriced beer and resolve to elbow your way to the center of the crowd.
The lights dim and the opening band comes on and by the end of the second song you begin to care less about being alone. That's when you see her. A blonde, sharp as a hypodermic needle, swaying in the kaleidoscopic haze. Her tendrils are damp with sweat and her makeup has melted away; she seems guarded but not unapproachable. You sip your beer a nameless voyeur as another girl leans to whisper something in her ear.
I can tell you what she says because the blonde girl, that's me. Caitlin tells me she's leaving but I mishear her. I nod idly, thinking she told me she just has to pee. Then we're alone together, the outliers of the crowd pushing us closer.
I see you, filling the space beside me, a handsome catch, a sensitive kid. Your straw-pale hair is haloed by the stage lighting and when I turn my head, realizing Caitlin isn't coming back, you smile at me.
An accumulation of chords, some cathartic suckerpunch of percussion echoes, blasts, turning the figures of the band into formless shards. The swarm of adrenaline drenched twenty-somethings we are roar for an encore. I can feel you in my periphery, holding your breath in that lull. Then the din blares back to music for one last set and we watch rapt.
Why here, like this, I think when our eyes meet again. The histrionics of an establishing shot, a common soundtrack to underscore our opening, the pitch and intensity and promise of the most fleeting moment: love at first sight.
Or something else entirely.
We begin talking during that dying cacophony after the last song. In the slow crawl to the door I find out your name is Conor and you think I say mine is Michelle. I don't correct you.
You suggest we get a drink and though I know I look like an asylum escapee, with my hair mussed and my cheeks crimson-flushed, I can't say no.
Into our second hour of talking and drinking, you mention your time stationed in Bahrain. I nod stupidly and without thinking tell you my boyfriend is in the Marine Corps.
A beat passes, tense and contracting like a cerebral charlie horse. I cannot tell but I think you're relieved by the inadvertent admission. Another band we both like will be in town in two weeks. You segue nonchalantly into this topic. Staring at our empty glasses, we agree to go together.
Nathan, my boyfriend, had already expressed a lack of interest in going with me. I dread asking him. His knees are the bane of his years after discharge. Both ACLs have been torn and his doctor is pushing for meniscus transplants. He refuses. Pain is a challenge for him, a duty. He's agony's ambassador. I'm going to spare him standing three hours at another general admission concert for a band he likes less than me. It's not his fault he's become my only friend.
My best friend from childhood, adolescence and until recently, Benna, moved to Florida five years ago. We used to text and talk and see each other when she came home for holidays. She's getting married next spring and I was supposed to be the maid of honor. But I bailed, the way she expected me to, and apologized and retracted my apology and haven't heard from her since.
All life is like that, sacrificing parts of yourself, cutting out and removing people that seem expendable at the time. It's a slow series of amputations until all you can do is remember who you were with them.
You meet me in the parking lot before the next concert. We walk and talk and try to ignore that we have so much in common. We have the same hair color too, and though your features are more chiseled and refined than mine, I know we could pass for siblings.
The looks I get from other women, the one's that assume we're on a date―those looks that ask, 'What is he doing with you?' or reassure themselves 'He must be gay,' those don't bother me. I'm the victor in this picture, regardless of how people perceive us.
There are conversational subtleties in our rapport after the show. We sit and drawl on into the early morning like we've both been in solitary confinement for 25 years. You keep mentioning your big house, with extra bedrooms, the grass you have to cut and the two car garage. I finally confess I'm bored living alone (I actually can't afford it much longer) and we arrive at a confluence. This is how futures form, late at night through tipsy dialogue and with hoarse voices.
Before the week's end, I've moved in with you.
Imagine this: you are an average guy. You have a military crew cut and a thick but trimmed beard. You've met a girl but your hopes don't hinge on her. You feel discovered, comforted, needed, loved and sometimes bored with her.
After four months you ask her to move in with you. She shrugs, freezes, maybe sees a grizzly bear standing behind you. She finally says no but buries it in so much gratitude that it relieves more than piques your suspicion.
One part of you needs to plant roots, knows you could raise a family. Another part is attracted to the openness, the non-exclusivity of this, with her. A few days later she says maybe she will get a roommate. You make a joke about lesbian pillow fights. She doesn't laugh.
You wonder how you got here, with her, of all people. You feel stuck, shackled to this place. You bought this house when you were engaged to your ex and you're stuck with it for three more years. Maybe she's a distraction, a transitory companion, warm flesh to curl up behind when you're afraid you'll forget how it feels. You've grown used to this, half fallen in love with her.
She does get a roommate. She tells you it's a guy and asks if you mind. She's already started moving her stuff in though, and even if you say yes, it won't matter.
You are Nathan and never Nate. Nathan is already an abbreviation for Nathaniel, you explained one night after you had only been dating her a few weeks. She made a joke and a rhyme about syllabic verse. You didn't laugh. Now she never calls you Nate. To your face.
Your relationship is hard to explain. The two of you have a vague history. She met you when she was an undergrad. You served with her friend Adam and were sharing a story about your time at Twenty Nine Palms when she infiltrated your next thought, her hand on Adam's shoulder.
You were both drinking too much that night and what you remember of the sex is graceless, blurry and perfect. It was more than her acquiescing to your aggressive pursuit. It was one night, without even the dimmest echo of ever seeing each other again.
Four years later though, you do. You've always imagined kismet being a collision.
This is more of a tap on the shoulder.
You're standing in the same aisle at the grocery store, trying to decipher why the other seems familiar. It's an anesthetizingly ordinary scene. Tabloids and chewing gum border the check out line. The florescent lights make the chain smoking cashier seem even more wan. You've gotten older.
I know you, is how you initiate, gaping through a long pause, like a shy kid to a pretty girl at recess. She follows you back to your place, makes stir fry and you talk like old friends. Like you know each other. Like you ever will.
The memory of this unsentimental beginning, the strange intersection this was becoming, now makes your sedimentary heart skip a beat. Remind yourself: this isn't a love story. It's an examination of the snares in life, the ones we stupidly set for ourselves, stumble into and bleed out from.
There is no rush into calling what you have a relationship. There is casual sex and rough sex and casual rough sex. There are conversations about the second amendment, your disparate childhoods, how you've never seen a Disney movie. Both of your personalities synchronize eventually. Despite the many firearms you own, she's not nervous around you. You laugh at her punchlines and dissect her long post-graduate days of all work and no play.
I know those long days as well as I know you. As well as I remember this:
It's an early weekday morning. I am dressed, completely. My make up is pressed on, my hair is combed. I'm reaching for my shoes when you come up behind me. Your hips pivot into some primal grind against the clothed cleft of my ass. Your beard grates the length of my neck.
Your hand unfastens my belt, pulls down the zipper.
No, I say weakly when you bend a knee into the back of my thigh, the hips of my pants loose and descending.
Seriously, not now. I have to go to work. My breath catches on the last syllable. I forget how to breathe. You make me forget, with your hand under my shirt. My back curves into a sharp arch.
Mid-air I gasp; you lift me up and slam me down on to the dresser. The mirror bangs hard against the wall. I settle on cold change and loose ammunition. I feel more blindsided than sexy. I go with it. Or I don't. I imagine I have control. I pretend I have a choice.
You ram into me, turgid slippery heat. I meet each uneven jerk. The edge of the dresser is too close. My toes curl in the thin air above the carpet. My thighs clench. Don't fall down now, I tell myself.
This is the worst kind of balancing act.
I writhe and struggle against you. I have a feeling this is what you want. I fight back with the confidence of an insecure adversary. Just as I'm about to collapse off the corner of the dulled oak finish, you pick me up and sweep me onto the bed––more premeditated crime than rhythmic choreography.
The smothering weight of you, backlit by passion or rage or whatever you're feeling, this is what I've loved about you until now. The unspoken, sometimes awkward or timorous but always honest disclosure, of Nathan, of us, together.
Every time I try to rise, you push me back down. I feign resistance and it spurns you; the harder I fight, the more I lose. You can't slow down. Your face is stained a wicked crimson. Sweat streams down your temples. There's venom in the few kisses we exchange. Chlorine gas in your breath.
My own arousal I sustain off the fuel of memories. I try to imagine what you're thinking, if you're lashing out because I've emotionally assaulted you. I imagine I deserve this, the blunt trauma of the vaguely non-consensual. I imagine that we can recover from this, from anything. You come inside of me on the evaporation of that thought, in a guttural slur, livid steam against my nape.
I want you to tell me you love me, or hate me. You lie quiet another five minutes then stand and stagger to the shower without saying a word.
This is the only time this happens. This is the only time your misplaced anger and agony find me in their crosshairs. I tell myself you are just Nathan being Nathan. I tell myself that I know you, but I don't.
I don't know anything.
We are eleven months in to this, whatever it is we have, when you tell me.
We are lying in bed, our sweat cooling. I am staring at your legs and feet when you tell me about Ellie. She is a woman you work with. You have worked with her four and a half years and you're in love with her.
Have you told her? Does she know? I ask, not as appalled as I should be.
No.
Why haven't you said something to her, asked her out...something?
The stakes. I'm scared I guess.
You hesitate.
I mean, the way it's been, it's still a possibility. If I ask her and she says no. Or even if she says yes and it doesn't work out, I've lost that. I'll still see her everyday. She'll be this reminder of my rejection.
At least rejection is something, I tell you. If you never act, never tell her, then it's nothing.
You turn onto your side and face me, considering.
Are you seriously encouraging me?
Yes, I say, sighing. Part of being your girlfriend is being your friend. As your friend, I want you to be happy. If I can't do that for you and she can, I would let go. Let you go.
I don't hesitate to tell you:
Be pragmatic. Be realistic. Don't throw hurdles in front of yourself this way. You owe me nothing.
I want to stop talking, I'm sounding far too removed from my own role here. I sound beneficent, naïve.
Do you really think there's something there? Could you make it happen?
You shrug, smile.
Should I start looking for wedding presents and baby clothes?
You stretch to draw the blinds and put your hand over my mouth and we fall asleep, less than wholly committed and not exactly happy.
In the morning, you're in a strange mood. My encouragement last night stirred in you more suspicion than hope. You are wondering if I have already fucked my roommate. You are wondering what Ellie will be like to fuck, her thin wrists pinned above her, her in your bed, the languid hopeful warmth of her body in your bed.
You want to ask about this big open question mark standing between us. Suddenly we can see other people. Never has a girl been so eager to offer as much. You're sure it can't be all altruism and the 'I just want you to be happy' line I spouted off last night. Women yearn for fidelity. How did you get paired with one who thinks it's fiction? Your mind balloons with nervous fear. You look at me for a second and then look down at your corn flakes. You feel as though I'm nobody special in the larger scheme of your life; you lose your appetite.
At work, things are tense. You approach Ellie, make small talk but never manage the ultimatum. She is your friend and colleague. You respect her. Every day your want for her broadens, grows. It's more than lust. Ellie is brilliant, independent, she has a background you admire and a recent break-up that terrifies you. You've been watching her for years. She was with him then. Now she may not be ready to move on. She may never be ready.
You may never be ready.
I am at work too. I have no infatuation here, nobody to salivate or vacillate over. I am reading The Portable Neitzsche. I want to be like Nietzsche. I want to write a book for all and for none, to say 'Nathan spoke thus,' to contemplate the existence of eternal return.
If I had to live this life again, if it was all just an hourglass turning over endlessly, no matter how miserable the thought of inescapable deja vu, suicide as relief is utterly debunked. The days go on and on. I am bored even when I am busy.
I make notes on my folder.
-Be kind to inanimate objects. They will be there for you long after the people in your life are gone -We're all killing ourselves in some way (and for no reason)
-Eleanors: Roosevelt, Rigby, Nate's
At home things become remarkably mundane. Conor and I wake and go to work, sometimes eat together, sometimes go out. We both know where this is leading. We are meandering toward it. We are old people with Hurrycanes, ironic and ambulatory.
We have become great friends. If we do this, when we do this, that could change.
Neither of us wants a relationship with the other. I think. The mutual attraction is there. I am not in love with him. Love is fleeting though. Even if I were, it wouldn't last. Even though I'm not, I could be. It could come.
There is no angst or tension or expectation between us. We take a shower together sometimes when the hot water is scarce and non-renewable. It isn't awkward. It isn't erotic either. We are like childhood friends who never separated. There is a backstory we feel but never experienced.
It's hard to explain.
One day, after work, we are are outside, arguing about who had the best Halloween costume. The permeating pine chill of fall air fills our lungs. The setting sun is scorching ocher along the horizon. Conor and I are sitting side by side on a dilapidated swing set in our backyard. He reaches for and takes my hand, holding it, warming it. Until now, we've never done this. We've never kissed. He's seen the texts I've gotten from Nathan, overheard our directionless fights, seen him around here less often.
How long has it been since Conor's break-up? Romantic as his heart may be, he's human. I'm not unaccessible, not miserably unattractive. His hand settles on the small of my back as we go inside. We skip dinner. A scene starts to unfold.
We are lying on the living room floor, listening to Transatlanticism and wishing we were in love. Or in something else, lyrically aquatic, swimming instead of sinking in the inimitable guilt we're about to conceive.
His hand runs the length of my arm. His hand clasps mine, our fingers interlaced. Minutes later he's curled fetal, one of his long legs draped over both of mine. His lips brush my temple, my chin. He pulls back.
What's wrong? He asks.
We shouldn't be doing this.
But we are. Three syllables in the crook of my neck.
You want to stop?
I shake my head. My face is clouded with a sad uncertainty, this terminal loneliness we're projecting onto each other. I am in it with him, no matter what words there are.
The title track replays. He is tracing his thumb over my cheek, framing my face in both of his hands. There's an obscene tenderness in the gesture and for a moment I wonder if my heart isn't a rock, a dense mineraloid tethering me to the moment, leaving me paralyzingly insecure and aware of its passing.
Conor is touching me in places he's never touched me before. I reciprocate, gauging the heat of his bare back, the soft ambit of an ear lobe. The room is dark except for the azure expectation of his stare
I hope stays dark forever.
I realize now, here, how unhappy I am with Nathan. I love him, yes. Offered the promise of a future with him? I'd choose this.
We kiss for what feels like half the night. There is a maladroit prostrate dance, our determination to make floor sex less of a dirty carpet-burning grind than it is. Soon we forfeit and stumble to his bed, a capsized cause, the undertow of blue sheets pulling us down deeper. I hold my breath. I cling to him. I close my eyes. I want to pretend. I want to imagine there is such a thing as requited love, to believe that it is real and here and him.
Conor is pulling my hair, our lips crushed together, the collision of our bodies snared in a breathless lapse of time. When I let go, drowned finally in the flood of this want, it's with simultaneous panic and relief. The last breath of air escapes my lungs, the heat of his release spills like tangible regret inside me.
After, he holds me. The room feels cold. He falls asleep first. The bedroom window, frosted in the corners, vignettes the night sky. I see stars in the distance, minute and quivering. I am always seeing stars.
Imagine this: Your roommate is in love with you. Your boyfriend is in love with a Cisco-certified slut he works with.
Scratch that.
You roommate is not in love with you. He's your hostage and his infatuation is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome. Your boyfriend is still in love with a woman he works with. There is an empty feeling when you're with him. You don't want to call it loneliness. You don't want to be that girlfriend, that wife, that mistress suffering this revelation.
You love him and you're sure he loves you in some fragmented, stop-start, half of his heart kind of way.
This should be enough. You want someone to tell you, you want someone to affirm: life is hard and short and sad. Here is someone to bide the time with. A cell mate, an accomplice.
You are living with a handsome, considerate peer. He happens to be the opposite sex. He's the third roommate you've ever had and after four years of living alone, you would not have expected this to be so easy.
Conor's quiet, leaves you your privacy and remembers to put the toilet seat down. He's got scruples and shares almost everything. You split the bills and the rent and the garage. He's single and not looking and you don't blame him. The connections we crave are never worth the pain.
All life is severing ties, then trying to staunch the blood.
Nathan and this Byronic unspoken ordeal has led the two of you to be in an open relationship. You've given him permission to act on his emotions, should he muster up the courage. He, in return, accepts the odds of you falling into the arms of your roommate.
In this way you have infinite trust but no stake in each other.
At work you walk through the halls with clenched fists. When you fuck Nate, you fuck him with clenched fists. It's defensive readiness, a premonition of having to block a punch in the face. It's an attempt to break your fall as you lose your footing and plunge off a self-fulfilled precipice. Don't fall down now.
You will never get up.
The days are long. You spend ten, thirteen, fifteen hours at work. You're a coward, a deserter. You are dodging confrontation, the denouement you know is near.
Nathan was someone you fought not to love. But it happened, creeping involuntary, the slow inertia of empty hearts sinking into the same ravine. This is how you lose him:
You leave work at four. The sky's a hazy slate. It's a long drive and your car heater can circulate dust, but doesn't warm a thing. You think of stopping, turning around. He's not expecting you tonight anyway.
You're knocking on his door. How did you get here? How did either of you get here?
You don't try to bandy words. You tell him you don't love him. You tell him you never did. You lie. The frustration, the cornered, stranded irreversibility of this begins to make you cry. Rivulets wend their way into your hair. You start to feel sick. Why didn't you drink some Pepto Bismol before doing this? Why are you doing this?
I'm sorry, you say. You keep saying it. A sob lodges in your throat. You are choking on your own words. Love drains from you, leaky faucet turned torrential deluge.
You stand there a long time thinking about the word foyer. Nathan is speaking low, almost whispering. You can't hear him over the tirade of your interior monologue. Then suddenly it's darker; the hallway's lost light. He leans in and kisses you on the cheek.
You should go, he tells you.
You turn and step out in to the numb quiet night. Stumbling to and starting your car, you drive away lost. Tears well and loiter in the corners of your eyes.
Forever he will possess some part of your heart. You will never feel safe again the way you did with him. You will always be emotionally anemic.
Weeks pass. Winter wanes then recurs before nature can recuperate.
It's snowing outside, the cottony crystalline kind that seems like it will never meet the ground. You're frozen, blank, inexpressibly abashed. Conor comes in to your bedroom, finds you staring at a blinking cursor. He is not here to console you. He has good news. He got the job in Seattle and they want him to start next week.
Congratulations, you say. Great.
If your stomach weren't empty, you'd vomit.
Conor is gone before you know what else to say. There is no farewell kiss, no goodbye quickie. People come in to your life and stay for the blink of an eye. You should be used to it. You should be detached. You should get a husband and start a family and pretend that makes this less likely to happen again. In the hard vacuum of his departure you try to write, try to channel your melancholy into words. You try to exorcise with prose. But you are not feeling inspired. You are feeling more like a prisoner about to be shanked.
It is a frigid colorless afternoon. You decide to call off work. Maybe you should quit. You walk outside and settle on a swing. There's no snow, no wind just the narrow spines of trees, the dark dead mat of leaves, the hollow echo of traffic, and you, on a solitary swing. You've got your head canted, staring at the ground. The cold air makes it hard to breathe. A silhouette of empty houses is creeping up behind you. You are alone. You have been the whole time.
Imagine that.
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tired
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Wilson has a threesome and it's NOT with House and Cuddy
Again I feel the need to rant about the most recent (third to the last) episode of House, ever. "Post Mortem" had Wilson striving desperately to be somebody he's not. No, really. He feigned Kyle Calloway--ate a 30lb steak, went on a road trip to Ohio, in a Ferrari, with House of course.
This roadtrip that tons of House/Wilson shippers have probably been waiting for since they got a taste of it in Birthmarks, was kind of depressing. Not that I was expecting it to be silver-liningly inspirational. It's just like TPTB had a bunch of bullet points to hit (House arranging for Wilson's threesome, the bright red sports car, Wilson's conscience coming back at the sight of a helpless old lady) that they completely forgot the purpose of the episode. It had potential to be a decent character study, with House standing beside his friend instead of sabotaging him and Wilson for once, not being the level headed rational adult. But denying him the finish line, having him realize, randomly and prematurely, the futility of what they're doing--it just wasn't poignant. And I don't blame Peter Weller's directing, or anybody's performances.
Hugh is an incredible actor, and RSL is too, and even though I've never read or written slash, I kind of wanted them to fuck at the end of last night's episode. Not because the episode was good, but in fact because it was so lackluster, gay porn would have been a highlight.
I remember when this show was good. That's all I can say to myself whenever I'm watching season eight. I remember House's Head and Wilson's Heart and narrative turns that made perfect sense. I feel like the writer's are panicking the same way terminal Wilson is and though the show has obviously run its course, you would think the writers might have had an end game, some cathartic clusterfuck that would end the show with the viewers wanting more or remembering it for some pithy denouement.
Here's the link to photos from the finale "Everybody Dies." Last night's episode ended with House staring at Wilson's scans and looking scared for his life. I am 99% sure Wilson will die. But who knows, maybe it will be House. Maybe they will resurrect Kutner just to kill him again. Even these pictures are lame. I remember being excited at spoiler photos before...now this is the show's FINALE and I'm just kind of like, meh.
http://www.spoilertv.com/2012/05/h…
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This roadtrip that tons of House/Wilson shippers have probably been waiting for since they got a taste of it in Birthmarks, was kind of depressing. Not that I was expecting it to be silver-liningly inspirational. It's just like TPTB had a bunch of bullet points to hit (House arranging for Wilson's threesome, the bright red sports car, Wilson's conscience coming back at the sight of a helpless old lady) that they completely forgot the purpose of the episode. It had potential to be a decent character study, with House standing beside his friend instead of sabotaging him and Wilson for once, not being the level headed rational adult. But denying him the finish line, having him realize, randomly and prematurely, the futility of what they're doing--it just wasn't poignant. And I don't blame Peter Weller's directing, or anybody's performances.
Hugh is an incredible actor, and RSL is too, and even though I've never read or written slash, I kind of wanted them to fuck at the end of last night's episode. Not because the episode was good, but in fact because it was so lackluster, gay porn would have been a highlight.
I remember when this show was good. That's all I can say to myself whenever I'm watching season eight. I remember House's Head and Wilson's Heart and narrative turns that made perfect sense. I feel like the writer's are panicking the same way terminal Wilson is and though the show has obviously run its course, you would think the writers might have had an end game, some cathartic clusterfuck that would end the show with the viewers wanting more or remembering it for some pithy denouement.
Here's the link to photos from the finale "Everybody Dies." Last night's episode ended with House staring at Wilson's scans and looking scared for his life. I am 99% sure Wilson will die. But who knows, maybe it will be House. Maybe they will resurrect Kutner just to kill him again. Even these pictures are lame. I remember being excited at spoiler photos before...now this is the show's FINALE and I'm just kind of like, meh.
http://www.spoilertv.com/2012/05/h…
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bored
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Everybody Dies?
Is anybody still watching House besides me? Granted, I don't know why I am. They just released the title of the SERIES FINALE (ugh) It should have ended with...Wilson's Heart. Or Help Me.
The title is "Everybody Dies."
Real original, cause, I mean, it's not like Amber ever said that.
The title is "Everybody Dies."
Real original, cause, I mean, it's not like Amber ever said that.
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aggravated
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Just Checking In
Hello, all who are seeing this on their friends page. I'm just checking into to say I may also post things here: http://melissaisdown.wordpress.com/
I'm wading my way through a short story right now. Will probably post it if I finish it.
Seems like LJ is changing a bit, not sure if I like it. Anybody else creating an alternative blog?
I'm wading my way through a short story right now. Will probably post it if I finish it.
Seems like LJ is changing a bit, not sure if I like it. Anybody else creating an alternative blog?
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How I Think House is Going to End
Okay. So although I've given up on the fic writing for this show (due mostly to no hope of Lisa returning) I have not given up on the show.
I've been thinking how it may end.
Here is how I want it to end:
It seems somewhat logical to me and since there's been a fair amount of shark jumping, I would like to see at least one more thing in the style of "Honeymoon" or "Three Stories".
I think Stacy should be the alum to return. (Really I think it should be Cuddy, but barring that...) I think that whatever arc they start with the "C" word --cancer, I presume until indicated otherwise, should end with House's life in jeopardy, much the same way it was when he had the infarction. I think it would make sense for the circlarity of this to come back to that: House+Stacy and an impossible judgement call. Maybe he'll have to choose his leg or his life again.
I also think that regardless of how it ends there will/should be a certain amount of ambiguity (i.e. we don't know if he dies or not)
That is all.
I've been thinking how it may end.
Here is how I want it to end:
It seems somewhat logical to me and since there's been a fair amount of shark jumping, I would like to see at least one more thing in the style of "Honeymoon" or "Three Stories".
I think Stacy should be the alum to return. (Really I think it should be Cuddy, but barring that...) I think that whatever arc they start with the "C" word --cancer, I presume until indicated otherwise, should end with House's life in jeopardy, much the same way it was when he had the infarction. I think it would make sense for the circlarity of this to come back to that: House+Stacy and an impossible judgement call. Maybe he'll have to choose his leg or his life again.
I also think that regardless of how it ends there will/should be a certain amount of ambiguity (i.e. we don't know if he dies or not)
That is all.
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curious
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