Title: No More Giants Author: Kristin Mackenzie E-Mail: krismackenzie@my-dejanews.com Category: SR Rating: NC-17 Archiving: Sure, just let me know. Spoilers: Milagro, The Unnatural Summary: Unnecessary things. Note: Smutcake! Post-ep smutcake, actually. Kudos to anyone who knows where the title came from. ////No More Giants//// Today I am nobody. I have no name, no job, no identity. Nothing defining me except the actions and thoughts that form themselves out of impulse and desire . . . today. I am sun-warmed and sleepy. My body curls itself into the blanket below, feeling the shifting of the sand underneath. The tide is coming in; each wave whooshes closer, and I can almost feel the Pacific nipping at my toes. Soon, we'll have to go. It doesn't bother me, because today is not yet over. We may rouse ourselves and lug the blanket and basket to the car, then walk across the boardwalk for an early dinner of thick, buttery clam chowder and crusty white bread. We may forego dinner entirely and go back to the tiny bed-and-breakfast where we left our things. Possibly sit on the porch with the owners and watch the sun go down over the ocean with a bottle of homebrewed ale to render the colors even more intense. For now I tighten my arms around the woman beside me and press my nose into her hair, which is drying into a tangle of curls. She is covered with coppery freckles and the beginnings of a sunburn, and her bathing suit is still slightly damp from our last wave-riding excursion. I bend to taste the salty-sweet place on her shoulder where the strap of her suit has slipped away. She shifts in my arms, stretching like a nap-sated kitten. "This was a good idea," she mumbles. "I'm glad you like it," I respond against her ear, leaning in to run my tongue along the edge of the lobe. She presses her hips back against mine, and as I open my eyes and meet the curious gaze of a five-year-old boy not ten feet away, I am suddenly reminded that even two people with no identity could probably be arrested for lewd behavior. I make a mental note to find a private beach next time. As usual, she's about two steps ahead of me, and is moving away from me before I can protest, making a half-hearted attempt at packing up the remains of our lunch. "So, what now?" I ask, sitting up and scrubbing at my hair, releasing a flurry of fine pale sand. She turns back to me, one corner of her mouth turned up. "Whatever. Doesn't matter." Her eyes hold the promise of at least one thing that will happen later, and I meet her gaze with my own, enjoying the little anticipatory sizzle that still passes between us. "Portland has a decent minor-league team," I venture. Her half-smirk becomes a full-blown grin. "We do baseball stuff every time you get to plan one of these outings," she complains, but her tone is teasing. "What can I say? I'm a born-again baseball fanatic." "I know." Her face changes, softens, and I imagine she's remembering the first time we checked out of reality for a weekend. We spent a sunny June Sunday at Coors Field in Denver, watching the Rockies get clobbered by the Braves. Possibly remembering that evening, dancing pressed tightly together at a club in LoDo, filled and fizzy with the local microbrews, and later falling into one another for the first time in a downtown hotel room bed. This is the fourth such side trip that we've taken. The only rule is that nothing from the real world is allowed to intrude. We travel under assumed names, leave our cell phones behind, and just . . . enjoy. Life. Each other. All the things we've been ignoring. I've loved her for so long that I couldn't count the days. I'm reminded of it every time she tends me, nurses me . . . is almost taken from me. All the bad things, laced together by that aching re-realization that adds a solar plexus blow to whatever other hurts we might be suffering. Last spring, holding her so tightly to reassure both of us that Padgett's creation had not harmed her, I found myself choking with love for her, killed by it as surely as if my own heart had been ripped out. The night we swung together at a thousand mechanical pitches, I remembered that I *like* her. I liked her from the moment she walked into my office. And it's that liking, that sense of camaraderie and kinship, that is the basis of our history together. Love came later, and has been so intrinsically bound with sorrow for us that it has long precluded any enjoyment or even acknowledgement of our physical attraction. But when we stepped back and let ourselves have fun with one another, let ourselves just like each other, not as two people bound by tragic history, but as two human beings who simply enjoy each other's company . . . the attraction flared again, ripe and time-sharpened. The only catch in all of this is that, while it's easy and necessary to keep our everyday lives out of these sometime trysts, it's impossible to keep the weight and heft of the trysts out of our everyday lives. We come back from these weekends relaxed, refreshed and content, and if the next case is horrifying, it becomes much more so by contrast with our recent happiness. "Hey," she says softly, "are you still with me? Looked like you were a million miles away." I take a deep breath and shake off the gravity of my thoughts. Looking at her flushed face and shining eyes, I have a sudden flash of her glowing and breathless beneath me, smiling, urging . . . "I'm with you," I say, swallowing hard. "Let's get out of here." We end up at a tiny restaurant just down the boardwalk, feeding each other plump, sweet shrimp and bites of dungeoness crab. The waiter leaves us mostly alone, and doesn't complain when we take up one of his tables for two hours on a busy weekend evening. I slip him a twenty over and above the thirty percent I left on the table, and pull him aside as we're about to leave. "Dancing," I say urgently. "Where can we go dancing around here?" He grins, and runs and appreciative but completely innocuous glance over Scully's slim form. "Lester's, down at the end of the boardwalk. Kind of twangy, but there'll be a band." I nod my thanks, and we're out the door. The sun is just setting as we meander down the boardwalk. Scully had tied a long piece of cloth around her hips into a skirt before we left the beach, and gingerly slid a wrinkled white shirt over her bathing suit top, wincing as it brushed her stinging shoulders. I made a mental note then to see what could be done with a bottle of lotion later on. Just now, I'm enjoying the way her sun-pink thigh peeks out from the slit in her makeshift skirt - "It's a sarong, dummy" - with every step. Lester's appears to be little more than a beach shack, but the music from inside is audible from a hundred yards away. Scully and I step inside, taking in the odd assortment of humanity lounging, dancing and drinking in front of us. The band is most definitely "twangy" - they seem to be a mixed reincarnation of Willie Nelson and the Beach Boys. I look dubiously down at Scully, but she is grinning. "Aren't you going to buy me a drink?" she asks, hips already swaying to the offbeat. The bar is completely out of place, a relic from another time. Polished mahogany with brass fittings and trim, the top smooth and glossy as crystal, the precise color of Scully's hair. The bartender is also a relic. His face resembles nothing so much as a withered crabapple with a topping of shaggy gray hair. He wears black RayBans and a faded Hawaiian shirt, and moves like a gnome through the forest of bottles and taps behind the bar. "Better git your lady a drink 'fore she find sommun else t'do it," he says by way of greeting, nodding at the dance floor behind me. I turn to see that Scully has been drawn into the small knot of dancers, and is shimmying away across from a fraternity punk whose face has gone slack with admiration. Her head is thrown back, and I can hear her laughter bubbling over the music. "Looks that way," I concede, turning back to the ancient bartender. "Give me two of the best of whatever you've got on tap." He nods sagely, and pulls two pints of a rich amber ale I've never heard of, handing them to me with a wink. "That'll get your motor runnin'," he says, accepting the ten I give him. The fraternity boy deflates visibly when I approach Scully. She flashes a conciliatory smile at him and turns to me, taking the large glass of ale I offer. We move to a rickety corner table and cautiously sit on a couple of chairs that look suspiciously like the failures from an eighth grade shop class. The amber-colored ale is rich and strong, and I suspect that it would, indeed, get somebody's motor running. Mine doesn't need any help. Scully looks ten years younger; she's laughing at the antics of the people on the dance floor, who have decided that three-chord rockabilly is as appropriate for moshing as anything coming out of Seattle. Her hair is a mess and the collar of her boat-neck shirt has slipped down off of one shoulder, revealing the black strap of her bathing suit. She is a college student on a spring break fling. She is having fun. She sees me watching her and smiles, bringing her pint up to her lips with both hands and taking a long, deep swallow, eyes focused on me over the rim of the glass. Just then, the band segues into a slow, grinding rendition of a song that feels familiar, and the mosh pit reluctantly scatters. I stand up and extend one hand to her. She slips her smaller one into mine, and I pull her up and out onto the tiny dance floor, where three or four oblivious couples already sway. She fits her body tight against mine, and we move perfectly together, wrapped in the soothing cloud of our anonymity in this place. Here, there are no conspiracies, no monsters, no mutants, no would-be assassins. No pain, no sorrow, no regret. I am able once again to forget my name and hers. We're tourists, honeymooners, maybe, just passing through. Better yet, we're college students, coming together in the last days of summer, in that perfect time of life when nothing has been made impossible by experience. I can feel her joints loosening, feel the warm radiance of desire spreading through her body. Every movement is a promise, a gift, a wish. She lifts her face and her eyes are clear and guileless, transparent with nearly-complete happiness. Completion will come soon, but for now, I bend and taste the sweet, smoky ale still on her lips. Our slow, hip-slung way shudders almost to a halt as we move into one another. Her nipples harden. I can feel them through three layers of fabric, pressing into me, creating a sympathetic response in my own body, but further down. I deepen the kiss, not caring who might be watching, not caring about the cramp beginning at the base of my neck. Her fingers tighten their grip on my shoulders, squeezing and relaxing in time to the relentless bass thud of the music, and I feel her raise herself onto tiptoe to get closer, closer . . . "Wanna get out of here?" I breathe against her ear. She nods vehemently against the crook of my neck. We stop only long enough to collect her bag, leaving our barely-touched glasses on the table, and slip back out the door into the deepening night. It's a short walk to the bed-and-breakfast. We stumble through it, clutching and clinging like drunken teenagers, laughing as the key doesn't want to work in the front door. No sign of the owners - we lurch up the stairs to the front bedroom where we left our suitcases. The bed has been turned back and the lamp turned on. I nudge her back against one post of the four-poster frame and set about finishing the work started at Lester's. My lips find her cheeks, her eyelids, the smooth creamy column of her throat, and, finally, her lips. Here in the half-light, having reinvented ourselves again for this weekend, I feel that we might be strangers. We might be those college students, away from home and from inhibition. I remember in a sudden flash the exhilaration of one-night stands before sex was dangerous: the heady attraction of two young, healthy bodies, coming together in mutual delight, with no thought for the next day. It might never come. Scully's deft hands have found their way under my shirt, and her fingers are tangled in the hair on my chest. I begin my own exploration, sliding my hands up her smooth, nylon-covered torso, cupping the full weight of her breasts through her bathing suit, pulling at her nipples just to hear the noise she makes when I do it. Her shirt has to come off. I grab the hem and pull, and she yelps, stepping away. "Sorry," I almost pant. "Hurt you?" She pulls the shirt carefully the rest of the way over her head. "Not really. Just got a little more sun today than I thought." "Ah." I ponder this for a moment, and then turn to rummage in my bag. "Get out of those clothes," I tell her. "I'll fix you right up." She snorts at this, but obeys, dropping the sarong skirt and stepping nimbly out of the black tank bathing suit. When I turn back to her, having found what I wanted, she is stretched out on the bed, blinking expectantly at me. I take a moment to appreciate the view, sliding out of my own clothes as I do so. "What is that?" she asks, nodding at the bottle in my hand. I grin. "Something that will make you feel better." "You brought the edible massage oil?" "Better. Close your eyes." She closes them, and I squeeze a good-sized dollop of greenish goo into my palm. I put the bottle down and move to straddle her on the bed. One eye pops open to squint curiously at me. "Uh-uh," I admonish, and the eye slides shut again. Her face, arms and shoulders are pink, as is her chest and the top of each breast. Not too bad a burn - it'll be mostly gone by tomorrow, but for now, I dip one finger into my palm, and reach down to trace a glistening line alone one rosy collarbone. She frowns, and then her face relaxes. "Aloe." "Very good, doctor." I concentrate on using a very light touch, spreading the cooling gel over her skin. Along the curve of her cheek, out to the shoulders and both arms, down across her chest, a little further . . . She is watching me through her eyelashes, lips parted. I can feel her body changing, tensing, anticipating the movement of my hands. "There's no sunburn there," she murmurs, but it's not a protest. I ignore her and continue my path, warming the slippery stuff between my fingers before sliding it across one nipple, and then the other. She arches beneath me, sighing. The aloe is slick and sticky at the same time, and I am enjoying the way it coats her skin at least as much as she is. I take another fingerful of gel out of my palm and run a long trail down her belly, scooting out of my own way as I go. She shivers as I reach her navel and circle it. I've brought my other hand down without her being aware of it, and she is totally unprepared when I spread the rest of the cool aloe gel between her legs, mixing it with the moisture already there. She gasps, and then groans as I use the pads of my fingers to stir everything up, gliding carelessly over her swollen clit and into the deep opening below. One finger finds its way inside her, exploring, making room for a second, and I set a slow rhythm, in and out. Her hips twitch, and I look up to see her still watching me, teeth now gritted, the beginnings of need in the tight line of her jaw. Keeping my hand where it is, I slide up along the curve of her body and find her lips again. She clings to me now, her own hands skittering along my back, one dipping around in front to find my cock. She is deft and quick, and within a few moments we are engaged in a battle of wills. My fingers find her clit, rolling it hard, and she writhes in my arms. "What do you want?" I murmur in her ear. "Tell me." Determination is on her face, but her eyes have gone soft and unfocused. "You first," she manages from between clenched teeth. And renews her own assault. It is my turn to writhe. "Uh-uh," I say, but my voice is shaky and weak. She chuckles, and before I can form another thought, I am pinned to the bed, straddled by a woman who got straight A's in hand-to-hand combat classes in another life. Her hair is hanging in her face and her lips are soft and full, and she's got the hottest, wettest part of her positioned just above the hardest part of me. "What do *you* want?" she asks me in a voice straight from a phone-sex line. Her breath is harsh and erratic, and her breasts rise and fall in time to its syncopated rhythm. I think the advantage might be hers only nominally, so I press upward, just enough so that the tip of my cock is poised at her opening. My gamble is rewarded; her eyes slam shut and her head falls back. But she doesn't move. "Say it," she insists. But her grip on my upper arms is loosening. She seems only mildly surprised to find the world suddenly reversed. In one gasping instant, she's on the bed, legs hooked around my shoulders, and I am buried ocean-deep inside her, muttering a half-coherent wish list in her ear as I thrust hard, hard as I can. She gives my words back to me, formless, breathless, as we spin the world away. "Mmmm, wanna fuck you." "So hard . . ." "Hard, hard . . . wanna make you come." "Uhnnn, yeah, like that . . ." "Feel it." "Uh-huh. God, more . . . " "More . . . never 'nuff." And then there comes a point where there is nothing to say, and we are poised together on some kind of cliff, waiting for the push that will send us into freefall. I slow, sucking air, trying to keep us suspended . . . "Mulder," she breathes, and we fall. We haven't spoken each other's names all weekend, keeping anonymity close to ward off the outside world. But she gives my name to me now and it's a talisman, an acknowledgement that we can never be strange or separate to one another. And so we fall. Later, when the world has reassembled, I hold her, breathing our scent, the stickiness of the aloe still on my fingers. I can feel the impending weight of tomorrow in her heavy sigh. Tomorrow, we will put our identities back on and resume our regular lives. For now, for today, there are no more sorrows, no more histories, no more names. I blink away sleep for as long as I can. ////End//// feedback slobbered over at kristinx99@aol.com