Think maybe Mulder knew Stella from his time in England? 👀
“Hello, Mulder,” she says, in her silk and sandpaper voice. “Fancy meeting you here.”
As though he hasn’t met her here before, as though his subconscious hadn’t sent him this way for her Hitchcock hair and her Hepburn timbre. He hasn’t worn the Stonehenge Rocks hat, thank goodness.
“How long has it been?” he asks, over Phoebe and Diana and Scully - Scully, like a bruise whose tenderness he keeps testing with a finger. He knows, nearly to the month, how long it’s been.
But he asks.
“Back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day,” Stella murmurs. She sips at the rock glass with her mouth like a damask rose. Blouse the color of old blood.
“‘Til he came to the place where the wild things are,” Mulder finishes, dreamy and wistful for the past and the future.
Stella makes a liquid sound. “You look good, Fox. Phoebe still misses you. Phoebe will always miss you.”
“I’m sure her aim’s getting better,” Mulder says.
Stella laughs into the sweet blackberry dark, the fiery gold of her drink. “I heard about your partner,” she says. “She desperately in love with you yet, Fox? Phoebe said she was quite devoted already a few years back, but you know how Phoebe is. A bit histrionic.”
He coughs a little. “We parted badly last time, Phoebe and I.”
“I heard,” Stella says. “Even I know better than to fuck victims, for heaven’s sake.”
She raises her brows for punctuation. Her eyes cooler than Scully’s, more calculating, however big and blue.
Mulder shakes his head. Good old Stella. He knows perfectly well she’d never get away with being so outspoken if she didn’t look like she does. The fact that Stella is perfectly aware of this pleases him. He knows his own Halo Effect as well, has exploited it shamelessly. Stella, like him, is a survivor.
“I’ve missed you too.” She winks for the fun of it. Mulder wonders how many poor bastards are desperately in love with Stella. He thinks Phoebe might have been, at a time.
“No you haven’t,” he says warmly. She is playful, but always honest.
“No, I haven’t.” she admits. “But I do now that I remember…aspects of you.” She makes a lazy circle with her tongue against the inside of her sculpted cheek.
Jesus, Stella! He blushes.
“I heard your partner is a doctor though,” Stella muses, swirling her ice. “I suppose she knows all the fun bits.”
“We haven’t…Phoebe doesn’t…” Mulder shakes his head again.
“Oh. Well. You around tonight?” she asks, direct as ever.
He is, he technically is, and he doesn’t have what it takes to say no to Stella or yes to his longing for his partner.
“Stella…” he says, low, hardening, remembering the sinuous machinery of her body, the way she left him both deeply satisfied and profoundly alone.
She gets to her feet, Detective Gibson, nudges his thighs apart with hers.
Mulder puts his hands at her hips, their roundness always surprising in such a small woman. She is pressed between his knees like a plucked flower. He touches her, draws her close. She smells like good breeding and warm silk and forgetting.
“What is it, Stella?” he murmurs. Remembers the constellation of freckles along her sternum, the taut vellum of her belly.
A whiff of her skin when she leans forward, a kiss of her platinum hair on his cheek. She presses her mouth to his, darts her tongue against his lips. Stella, Stella, this is what he needs to avoid the hard choices at home. Stella like an Akhal-Teke, lean and golden and rare. Riding her for miles.
“Go home,” she murmurs, her sweet, peaty breath in his mouth. “You’re absolutely useless, darling.”
He is stung. “Stella, I-“
“Let’s not spoil the memories, hmm?” she says. “Go tell her.”
“I don’t -“
Stella’s immaculate finger at his mouth.
She leaves cash at the bar, saunters out from between his legs without ever looking back.
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