The Unicorn Tamed 1: Admission

It was rather good wine, and he had ingested more of it than was usual -- but then, it was Saturday night, and he supposed that a certain amount of self-indulgence was permissible. And then there was the fact that he was with Scully; and that was making him a bit reckless.

And nervous.

They didn't often spend off-time together, though he'd frequently wished they would. Lately, though, they'd been growing closer; and when she'd extended the tentative invitation to her apartment, he'd leapt at the chance to spend his evening with her, rather than alone. It had been a good evening; they'd nibbled at tortilla chips, drunk wine, watched television, talked...

But now, he was beginning to wish he'd never come over.

"So there we were," Scully was relating her tale, "on our way from the prom to the cabins, and the limo gets a flat tire..." How they'd gotten onto the subject, he wasn't quite sure; it certainly wasn't one he'd have picked, not in a thousand years -- but here they were, talking about it, the very last thing in the world he wanted to be discussing; and here he was, tense and anxious and trying his damndest not to let it show, praying that somehow the conversation wouldn't get to the point that he knew it would.

"Finally, the driver gets the tire changed," she continued, while he struggled to maintain his facade of calm attentiveness, "we drive to the place, Patrick checks in, we get to the cabin... which has sleeping arrangements for two, as promised; except that they're bunk beds." She chuckled at the memory, and he forced laughter to match. "We managed to make it work, somehow; but it certainly wasn't what I'd expected." A smile touched her face, her eyes softening with the fond remembrance.

And then she looked at him, her eyes intent and curious, and spoke the words he'd been dreading. "So, Mulder," she wondered aloud, "what was it like for you, your first time?"

Shit.

He drew a deep breath, and prepared to lie. "Oh, you know, the usual thing; cold night, warm beer, Dad's car..." and shrugged expressively, hoping that would end it.

"C'mon, Mulder, don't hold out on me," Scully parried -- slurring her words slightly; he hadn't been drinking alone -- "I told you my story; it's a fair trade." She reached to pour herself another glass of wine, found the bottle empty, and set to work opening the second.

"There's really not much to tell," he answered, struggling for nonchalance, "just, y'know, the typical teenage crap," and steadfastly kept his eyes averted, unable to meet her gaze.

Shit.

The silence grew, deepened, became ominous, as he sweated out the wait for her reply. She didn't buy it, he knew she didn't buy it; the only question was, would she let him get away with it, or...

"You bastard," she muttered.

Startled by the vehemence of her tone, he glanced up, into her eyes.

And flinched, for it was like being hit in the face with a steel beam; the impact of the fury in her gaze was stunning. "After all this time," she said slowly. "I told you my story, I trusted you with my past, and after all this time, you still can't trust me..." She turned away from him, wrenched angrily at the recalcitrant wine cork, which seemed to be actively resisting her efforts to remove it from the bottle.

"Scully, it's not like that," he protested, miserably aware that he was fighting a losing battle. "It's not a matter of trust, I just... you don't understand."

"No, I don't understand," she shot back. "I don't understand why you can't share yourself with me; you want to know who I am, but you give so little of yourself away... Trust no one, that's really all you know, isn't it? Except that this is me, Mulder. This is me you're refusing to trust."

"That's not it, Scully! I just... I can't tell you..." He could have lived with her anger, but the hurt in her voice was awful; it wrenched at him, set up a resonating ache within himself. How am I going to get out of this? he wondered dismally, with the sinking feeling that he wasn't going to get out of it, that he was trapped in quicksand, being sucked under.

"Why, Mulder?" she pressed. "Why can't you tell me?" muttering a swift angry curse as she struggled with the corkscrew.

He fumbled for a plausible lie, but none came to mind; he reached desperately for something to tell her, anything but the truth, but found nothing...

Shit.

"I can't tell you my first-time story because I don't have one," he mumbled, hating the world, hating himself.

"What? Don't be ridiculous, Mulder; everybody has a first- time story," still fighting with the wine bottle, barely paying attention to his words.

"I don't," he said, very quietly. Then, awaiting the inevitable response, rallying irony as his last pathetic defense, he added, "But I'll tell you what, Scully; if I ever do manage to lose my virginity, I promise I'll give you a call and tell you all about it."

Watching her, he saw her realize -- finally, belatedly -- what he had said; she looked up at him with wide, astonished eyes.

And the wine bottle slipped from her grasp and fell with a muffled thump to the carpeted floor.

She was staring at him, staring as if she'd never seen him before... he endured it as long as he could, then turned away. Unable to sit still, he stood and took several paces away from her, wishing he could distance himself from the issue as easily. Damn. Dammit. I shouldn't have told her, I should have let her stay mad at me, anything would have been better than this...

"You're kidding," she said slowly, to his back.

"Why the hell would I kid about something like this?" he snapped. "Oh, yeah, that's my idea of humor: humiliating myself for fun and profit." Her continued silence unnerved him; he sought to fill the void with words. "You wanted me to share -- well, I shared. And now you don't believe me? Fine, Scully. Believe what you want."

"It's not that I don't believe you..."

He wanted to be gone, as badly as he'd wanted to be there in the first place; as eager as he'd been to spend time with Scully, now all he wanted was to be away from her. Anywhere else but here.

"I just," she continued, sounding as if she was fumbling for words, "I just can't imagine anyone choosing to remain a virgin," and her voice dropped on the last word, as if it embarrassed her to even say it.

A harsh bark of laughter emerged from his throat. "You think it was my choice?"

"Well, it couldn't have been lack of opportunity... I mean..." and her voice trailed off.

"Women don't exactly throw themselves at my feet," he muttered darkly, thinking, I want to be anywhere but here, doing anything but having this conversation, and why the hell did I tell her, anyway? The secret had grown huger and more ominous with every passing year -- the derision and scorn he faced simply by being 'Spooky' Mulder was formidable; how much worse would it be, if people knew this? And now he had handed that secret to the person who held the ultimate power over him, the one who could shatter him, now, with a single breath of laughter...

He felt a touch on his arm; it startled him, so that he nearly flinched away. Her fingers brushed lightly against his sleeve, then curved around his arm, holding on firmly. "You have nothing to be ashamed of," she remarked, in a voice both carefully casual and deeply compassionate; a voice whose sympathy made him cringe even as it brought him nearly to tears.

"At my age? You don't think so? Forgive me if I don't share your opinion." He could hear his voice shaking, could hear the sobs barely held in check, and struggled to hang on to his tenuous control. Bad enough that she should know; worse by far for her to see him break and know how much it affected him, to be such a misfit in such a vital way.

Then he felt her other hand come to rest on his back, rubbing gently, long soothing strokes. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "I'm sorry I pushed you into telling me. I... I didn't mean to hurt you."

The tears were far too close to the surface; he was trembling, he could feel it, and knew that she could feel it too. "Forget it," he said harshly.

"Mulder..."

"No, I mean it. I want you to forget I ever told you." As if she could. He knew better... and now, every time she looked at him, she would be thinking, Mulder, the thirty- six-year-old virgin, unable to see him as anything more.

"I won't," he heard her say firmly. "Mulder... you've shared something very personal, and obviously very painful to you. It... it matters to me, that you trust me that much. It means a lot to me." Then her hand moved -- her arms slipped around his waist, hugging him; he felt the length of her body pressed against him, her cheek resting against his back, the vibration of her voice when she spoke. "I won't betray your trust," she added, very softly. "I promise."

He couldn't talk. He didn't trust himself to speak. He drew a deep breath, and felt it shudder through him, felt her arms tighten around him -- then, the final blow; through the thin fabric of his shirt, he felt her lips form a brief, soft kiss against his back.

It undid him. It unraveled him.

The first sob caught him by surprise, and his fists clenched as he fought to hold back the pain... desperately, he tried, but it was a losing battle: the tears were liquid fire, burning his closed eyelids; the agony of the secret and the revelation far too much to restrain. It was a long, slow slide -- tears slipped down his face, etching saline trails, and still he fought; sobs shuddered through him with every breath, and still he struggled; and all the while, Scully was holding him, holding on, refusing to let go, refusing to leave him to face the misery alone.

Finally, the weight of it crushed him, battering through his last fragile defenses: he crumpled to his knees, buried his face in his hands, crying helplessly.

A moment later, she was on the floor beside him. Her fingers curled around his wrists and tugged them aside, not letting him hide from her; she brushed the tears from his face and pulled his head down to rest against her shoulder, one hand settling against the back of his neck, holding him as he cried. She never said a word, for which he was unbearably grateful; there was nothing she could say that wouldn't make it worse -- too humiliating, to first confess his deficiency, and then compound it by falling apart this way -- but the feel of her arms around him was immensely comforting.

Acceptance. Something he'd so rarely encountered in his life that he didn't quite know what to do with it when he found it.

And for awhile, he simply let himself sink into it, into the warmth of her embrace; allowed himself to cry, without restraint, without guilt. But eventually, the inevitable self-consciousness set in, and with it, the awkward tension; it dried the tears in his eyes, stilled the sobs in his throat, and caused him to pull away from the haven of Scully's arms.

The world felt colder, outside her embrace; but then, he was well used to that. For him, the world had always been a cold place, and moments of warmth the exception, rather than the rule.

He turned away from her, the better to regain some semblance of composure -- wiped the last traces of moisture from his skin, arranged his face into its usual calm, unrevealing mask. The only way he could do it was to pretend that it had never happened, that he hadn't told her, that she didn't know...

"Do you want to talk about it?" he heard her ask.

"No," he said flatly, thinking, and I don't want you to ever mention it again, Scully, knowing somehow that he wasn't going to be that lucky.

A brief silence. "Okay," she said, "want to order a pizza?" in the same tone of voice, carefully nonchalant with an underlying edge of empathy: a voice that said, more eloquently than words could, that she was willing to let things be the same between them -- as if he had never told her, as if it had never happened.

For the first time in an eternity, he looked at her -- gazed into her eyes, and found her gazing back steadily, unflinching, with that limitless acceptance. As if he weren't a freak of nature, emotionally crippled by his lack of experience. As if he were still, simply, Mulder -- her partner, her friend -- the same man he'd always been, and no less than that.

He drew a long, deep breath, released it in a sigh of relief. Maybe I'll survive this, after all. "Pizza sounds good," he admitted, and drank in the sight of her smile.

She got to her feet, pausing to pick up the fallen wine bottle on the way. "Here," she said, "you open this; I'll order the pizza."

"Okay," he said agreeably, accepting the bottle and corkscrew she handed him, feeling as if -- maybe, just maybe -- everything would be all right, after all.

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