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Bestow

She’s thirty minutes into Pretty Woman when she thinks, Oh, fuck it. Struck by a sense of possibility so intense it makes her laugh, desperate and giddy, she bursts into her bedroom and throws open the closet. Mulder. Mulder. Mulder is alone across town and she is one week cured of cancer. It is a Friday night and there are so many things she wants them to do together—they need to start right now. Right now. Black slacks and a black sweater with a deep V. The whole time on the sofa she’d been thinking of him: what if Mulder was next to me, would he complain and then we’d laugh, that nose, those eyes.

Laughing with Mulder. She hasn’t done it in so long and she remembers the feeling and for the first time in so many months she is strong enough to chase it.

–

When he opens the door, she is leaning against the frame with great drama. She looks like the cover of an Abba album, standing like that.

“Hello,” he tries.

“Mulder,” she claps, “we are going out.”

She marches into his apartment. She’s committing to this with confidence, because if things go wrong, she can play it off. If she were to ask him rather than order—Take me out?—rejection loomed, far more embarrassing.

–

She sits on his bed with her legs crossed as he selects an outfit. “This?” He holds up a knit green pullover. She shakes her head.

“This?” His black turtleneck.

“Mm-mm. Fancier.”

Mulder knows better than to argue with a Scully who’s shown up at his apartment cashmere-clad and braless, demanding they go out. He puts on a white shirt and loops the red tie she likes around his neck.

“So where’re we going?”

She rolls onto her stomach and props her head in her palms. Her hair swishes and a little piece in front falls over her eye. She blows it away and shrugs. It stops his heart, Scully lolling on his bed like that. He forgets, momentarily, how to tie a tie.

–

“Let’s take a cab,” she’d told him when he grabbed his car keys.

She tells the driver Georgetown and sits close. When he takes her hands and says This is gonna be a really great night, Scully. Thank you, she beams.

–

Martin’s Tavern is, allegedly, where JFK proposed to Jackie. Tonight there are twinkly lights and space heaters on the patio. It’s crowded. He can see Scully’s breath when she talks, but it fizzes quickly once touched by the heat of bodies nearby. They sit at a little metal table that chills his ass through his pants. Scully slides her chair close over the bricks. She crosses her legs at the knee and her boot comes to rest against his calf. They have two pints. Mulder does a dramatic lip sync of “Piano Man” in his seat until Scully covers her eyes, grinning and humiliated.

When she gets up to go to the ladies room, he stands. She blushes and smiles down at her shoes. He feels proud to be her gentleman.

When Scully looks back up at him, the space between them seems urgently vast. It is unbearable that they do not touch. She trips towards him, wrapping him suddenly in a fierce hug. Their bodies process more quickly than they do; their recent trauma simmers immediate; just as suddenly as she came, Scully fingers knot in Mulder’s shirt, gripping him tight. One of his hands roots in her hair, presses that perfect, beautiful head to his chest. They cling.

“I missed you so much,” Scully whispers to his neck. Her voice catches. “I was so afraid.”

Mulder cannot speak around the lump in his throat, so he only nods, and doesn’t.

When Scully comes back from the restroom they have two more pints, and two more.

Giggling mischievously as she does, Scully reaches across the table to roll up his shirtsleeves with slow, tipsy fingers and great care.

This man is so precious to her. If she died, how would he go on alone? She remembers she has something to give him.

–

In the cab home—to Scully’s—she bounces her foot like crazy, riddled with nervous energy. He watches.

“What?” she asks. She is skeptical even still.

He puts his hand on her knee and smiles at her long and lazy. “You look really good tonight, Scully.”

–

“I have something to give you.” She darts off to her bedroom, abandoning him in the foyer. He hangs up his coat. He takes off his shoes and scoots them into a neat pair by the door with his big toe.

When she comes back he is on the couch, head back, eyes closed. He opens them in time to see her slide, a little, in socked feet across the hard wood. There’s a cardboard box in her arms. She sets it on the coffee table.

“Hey. What’s all this?”

She doesn’t sit with him. Instead she paces, chewing on her lip. “I… have things for you.”

“For me?” She’d already told him as much, but he sits up to peek around her box, curious.

She nods.

The first thing she withdraws is his own black scarf, lent to her sometime in 1993, never returned, and worn around her neck all winter, every winter, ever since.

“My scarf?” he asks, incredulous.

“It’s done me well,” she says, softly. “I want you to have it back.”

Then it’s the quilt from the end of her bed, folded up as small as could be. “It’s not very warm,” she disclaims, but she loves it. She’s had it since college—since right before she moved away from home. And why the hell is she giving it to him?

Next, a handful of AAA batteries, “Just in case.” Breakfast at Tiffany’s for VCR. Relatedly, a copy of In Cold Blood, swollen from being dropped in the bath. Her high school yearbook. A binder of handwritten notes. A seashell. Her waffle iron.

These are good things. But he doesn’t understand. These are Scully’s things.

“This is the last one,” she tells him, and her father’s copy of Moby Dick rises from the box and into his hands.

“Scully.” He looks up at her in surprise. “I…” he shakes his head, begins to pass the book back. “I can’t accept this.”

She shifts foot to foot and swallows, as if waiting for a blow.

And then he gets it.

The ensuing horror is a gut punch. The quilt, the yearbook, her books. These were the things she meant to bequeath to him. And she wants him to have them anyway. He stands up, sick. He backs away from her. “What the hell, Scully?”

His voice is pained. Her chin trembles. “I just wanted you to have them,” she says. She reaches around her neck, unclasps her cross. Approaches him slowly, as if he might run. “I just want you to have these things,” she pleads with him, a whisper. “Please.”

“Scully.”

He will die here on the spot.

“When I—“ she falters. “I thought so much about all the things I would get to give you and I—please, please take them, Mulder. I need you to have them.”

He shakes his head and she is on him then, batting his hands away to put her cross on his neck. He catches her wrists.

“Scully.”

She squirms.

“Scully, stop.”

“Mulder, this is the only control I have.” Even now, trembling before him, she is stalwart. Strong.

“You need your waffle iron, Scully. You need your quilt and your notes. These are your things.” He takes her by the shoulders. “You are alive.”

“I need you safe, Mulder. No matter where I am in the world. I need you safe and—and warm.” Her voice cracks.

The quilt. The scarf. The batteries to keep a light on. He takes her in his arms.

“I have you,” he promises her, and she sniffles. He cups her cheeks, hands like great, big earmuffs, and puts his forehead to hers. “I have you.”