“I’m running late.”

She was left standing at the door, mouth hanging open, eyebrows raised, and arms extended, offering up the breakfast she had come to deliver. He turned and rushed back inside the motel room, leaving her to invite herself in. She closed her mouth and rolled her eyes.

“Mulder?” she asked, turning to close the door behind her. The only response was running water and the sound of gargling. She pursed her lips. When he reemerged from the bathroom she sat down at the edge of his bed and took in his attire. A wrinkled and completely unbuttoned white oxford shirt, and even more wrinkled, but equally unbuttoned gray suit pants. The definition of his abdominal muscles winked at her from between two strips of crinkly white cotton and she cleared her throat demurely, suppressing an almost primal urge to groan instead. Before looking away she tried to get a peek at what exactly he was wearing beneath his slacks, but her investigation was suddenly thwarted when he glanced in her direction.

“Bagels?” he asked hurriedly.

“Yes,” she responded, sounding remarkably disinterested since she had just been ogling him. He grabbed the coffee from her limp grasp and took a sip.

“Thanks a million, Scully. I was planning on starving until we finished talking to the families.” He began to haphazardly toss belongings that had been strewn across the floor of the room back into an open suitcase as she set the bag of food beside her and crossed her arms.

“Nice suit, Mulder,” she commented dryly. Might as well point out what had her so distracted. Of course, he missed the fact that what she had meant to comment on was his state of undress, and he earnestly launched into a speech about his packing habits which she promptly ignored.

“I couldn’t find my garment bag on Wednesday, so I ended up just tossing some stuff in here, figuring I’d iron it all when I got here. Which I did, yesterday. But today…” He grinned at her as he threw in what looked like a black suit coat. “I’m running late.” He took a deep breath and stared for a moment at the suitcase, seemingly deciding if there was anything else he needed to dig out of it, and then, satisfied, turned back to her. He reached down and buttoned his pants, and began to button his shirt from the bottom up, all the while watching her in puzzlement. “You seem quiet. Did you sleep ok, Scully?” She watched, bemused as he missed a button and left a gaping hole of fabric sticking out from his midsection.

“Mulder…” she began. He followed her gaze and reached to correct his mistake with frantic fingers.

“Damn it.”

“Mulder…” she began again. He finished buttoning his shirt and began to smooth out the wrinkles as if he were in junior high.

“I got it,“ he responded. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Mulder it’s 8:30.” He froze.

“What?”

“I don‘t understand why you‘re running around, Mulder. It‘s only 8:30.” She licked her lips to suppress a smile at his dumbfounded expression.

“Are you telling me I’m not running late?” he asked.

“It’s 8:30. Not… ” she turned, looking over her shoulder at the neon red of his bed-side clock radio, “9:30,” she read, unsurprised. She stood and patted him on the shoulder before stooping to retrieve the suit coat from his suitcase. She began to fold it neatly as he huffed and started unbuttoning his shirt again. She tried to keep her face its normal neutral, but still found her eyebrows creeping up toward her hairline as he loosened button after button, finishing with his cuffs before pulling the shirt off completely. She set the jacket down and swallowed, averting her eyes from the expanse of skin he had just revealed and reaching out toward him. “Here, I’ll do it,” she told him, catching the shirt as he tossed it at her and heading toward the ironing board that had already been set up in the corner of the room.

“Why does my clock say that it‘s 9:30?” he wondered, annoyed. She turned the iron on and crossed her arms, leaning against the wall and letting her eyes drink in the way that he was shirtless and frantic, even after she had told him that he wasn’t running late, letting her eyes drink in the way that his skin pulled across his back as he refolded the things he had tossed into his suitcase only moments before.

“Did you set your alarm after you left my room last night?” she wondered lazily, her voice a little bit droopy with the lust that was pumping through her veins. He stood up tall and sighed.

“Yes…” he admitted, turning toward her so that she had to look away and pretend to check if the iron was hot.

“And you didn‘t notice that an hour had magically gone by somewhere between there,” she pointed toward her room next door, “and here?” she asked him, and his only response was to reach up and scratch at the back of his neck in irritation. The movement pulled the muscles of his chest tight and long and she decided that the best way to distract herself was to start stretching his shirt out on the flat surface of the ironing board beneath her palms. While doing that her mantra was something about professionalism and self control and she was being so adamant with herself that she completely missed his approach and was startled by the appearance of his bent, shirtless form reaching down to untangle his tie from the foot of the ironing board.

Something happened, and later she would claim it was a kind of short circuit in her brain…or maybe demon possession…or…she had no idea. But something happened and she ended up reaching out to touch the skin of his back…

Her fingers were shaking when they finally landed on his spine, warm and long and lean and nothing she hadn’t touched before but somehow this was different…the intention behind the gentle brush of her fingertips was rich with possibility and Mulder stopped breathing.

***

His fingers wrapped tightly around the silk of his tie and he paused for as long as he could to try to prolong the feeling of her hand against his back…the way that it felt like she meant something by it and the way that that made his blood boil. Reluctantly, he finally stood, expecting her hand to fall away and her face to seem unaffected and for them to go on as if that sizzle of electricity hadn’t just happened, expecting her to claim she had lost her balance or had been caught off guard by his presence.

But instead her fingers stayed motionless against him until he rose, and then they drifted delicately to the front of his chest and hung there like some kind of other worldly thing.

She was staring at the spot where her skin touched his, and he felt himself start to breathe again. It was hard and fast, air gushing out of him only to be sucked back in a millisecond later. He was towering over her and she was leaning into him and he thought he must be dreaming because there was no way this was happening right now.

“Scully?” he breathed, and she licked her lips.

“Yeah?” she muttered, trance-like and sexy-low. His tie-laden hand drifted up and landed against her hip, wrapping around the bone of her like that could still the frantic beating of his pulse and the way that maybe he was hyperventilating. She’d always healed him before…

“I, uh…” he mumbled inarticulately. His eyes tracked the motion of her throat as she swallowed and raised her eyes to his face, her fingers tangling with the hair on his chest and making his eyes glaze over with the feel of it. He tipped his head down toward her and inhaled the scent he had come to know so well and wondered how they hadn’t been here before this…he thought she must’ve had the self control of a nun if she was really as attracted to him as it seemed in this moment, because he‘d basically been shamelessly throwing himself at her since she‘d first walked through the door of his office, but she had kept herself casually at arm’s length. Until now.

His mouth drifted just over hers and he watched in wonder as her eyes slid closed. Thoughts of rules and regulations and conspiracy and missing people floated from his mind and all he could think about was how many times he’d thought about doing this…

Holy shit.

“Scully…” he muttered, letting the word drift across her mouth on the ocean of his breath. She let her hand slip down and around his side so that she was wrapped around him and could feel the heat of his chest against hers.

“This is probably bad,” she whispered, and he chuckled because she was so earnestly trying to be the voice of reason that she usually was. Her voice, though, was too thick with want to make him believe that she really thought this should come to a screeching halt.

“Not really,” he replied decisively, sure that they would argue about it later. She licked her lips again and he was sure he was about to taste whatever it was she had just tasted, the thought making his stomach tighten in anticipation. Without giving her another chance to protest, he swept down and pressed his mouth against hers hotly…exhaling against her, and it was like the muscles and bones in her neck just evaporated because her head went limp and she hummed deep and low and smooth and it was just like he‘d imagined she‘d sound. He sighed out her name when her tongue reached out to touch him.

And somewhere a phone started to ring.

They leapt apart like they had been burned and he watched, his pulse pounding, as her cheeks reddened almost automatically. Grimacing, he scratched at his forehead as she reached into her back pocket for her cell phone and flipped it open, avoiding his gaze. He couldn’t hear what she was saying into the phone because the blood rushing in his ears and the thoughts running through his head were too loud and overpowering.

He was just getting around to considering how soft her skin was when she flipped her phone shut and turned back to him, meeting his eyes for only a second before her gaze skittered away and landed somewhere just behind him. He chewed on the inside of his cheek and planted his hands on his hips, the air suddenly feeling annoyingly cold against his naked chest.

“Christina Macavoy didn’t come into work this morning,” she informed him frostily and he grimaced his defeat as she bent down to grab her coffee and the bag of bagels and head for the door. It wasn’t until she had firmly planted one foot outside of his room that she turned around and pierced him with her gaze. He saw her stare for what it was…a kind of warning…a kind of plea, begging him never to mention what had just happened again.

He tried his best to put a “not a chance in hell” look on his face, and hoped she could read that just as clearly. She looked away from him and licked her lips nervously.

“I’ll meet you in the car,” she forced, her voice cracked with the fractures of sexual tension.

He flinched when the door slammed shut.

***

Pam didn’t even own the capabilities to hide her double take when he walked through the door without a coat, his messenger bag slung casually across the fabric of his black sweater…a piece of clothing that had the distinct power to rob her of speech and make her break out into a cold sweat.

It was casual Friday and Jim was wearing a black sweater over his white oxford shirt and khakis. There were so many things about that statement that just weren’t right.

He said hey and he flopped into his desk chair tiredly and she was sure that he couldn’t possibly realize the significance of his wardrobe choice. It probably wasn’t even the same black sweater, which she imagined he’d probably burned right before he’d left for Connecticut, but to her it didn’t matter. Jim Halpert in a black sweater was Jim Halpert in a black sweater…and it seemed like that fact ensured that Pam would be unproductive, skittish and moody all day long. By ten o’clock she found herself reliving Casino night in a way that she had just recently gotten over doing, and by eleven she found herself feeling a new kind of anger toward Jim and his months of this special kind of unattached stand-offishness, pretending none of it had ever happened and ignoring her beach day courage in favor of his own cowardice.

The more the hours wore on the more she was sure he’d worn the shirt on purpose.

The words What the hell? kept looping through her mind, and it wasn’t until just before her lunch break, when Dana Scully arrived and Pam found herself glaring back at the agent‘s cool squint, that she realized she needed to pull it together.

“Can I help you, Agent Scully?” she wondered, watching with half-hearted interest as Agent Mulder elbowed his way sluggishly into the office behind his partner, something in his presence a little bit more brooding than it’d been the day before. Scully pressed her lips at Pam and raised a delicately shaped eyebrow.

“How are you, Pam?” she asked quietly, and Pam pulled back a bit in surprise. Maybe the FBI agent was just the kind of person who took a few days to warm up to her surroundings. Pam’s eyes flicked anxiously to Jim’s back without her meaning for it to and Scully’s gaze followed, but instead of looking back at Pam with judgement or a sort of disgustingly female curiosity she looked back at her with something that was almost like commiseration.

“I’m fine,” Pam sighed. Scully nodded.

“Can you just inform Michael that we’ll be using the conference room again for another set of interviews, unless you have something scheduled during the lunch hour?” she requested, her voice low and tired and laced with something Pam almost felt like she recognized.

“Sure,” Pam responded, forcing a tone of contentment that she didn’t really feel. If they were back and Agent Scully was tired then didn’t that mean…

Someone else was missing.

Her brow furrowed in concern as her gaze followed Scully into the conference room and then swung back to meet Mulder’s hollow stare. He lifted his chin toward her in greeting.

“Morning,” he mumbled and she felt her expression twist into a look of empathetic concern. She’d only known these people twenty four hours, but it was enough to know that something between yesterday and today had gone wrong and it was only partly to do with an eighth missing refrigeration employee. Their rapport was different…stilted…careful. Mulder slouched and shuffled his way into the conference room behind Scully and Pam’s eyes flicked back to Jim and his very black, very significant sweater.

***