From: mountainphile Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 13:53:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: xfc: NEW: Sunset Visitation (1/1) by mountainphile Source: xfc TITLE: Sunset Visitation (1/1) AUTHOR: mountainphile RATING: NC-17 EMAIL: mountainphile@hotmail.com URL: http://www.geocities.com/museans/mountainphile CATEGORY: MSR, vignette SPOILERS: Post "This Is Not Happening", a blink at FTF SUMMARY: Her pregnant body beckons to him... ARCHIVE: I'd be honored, just tell me where so I can visit! DISCLAIMER: All things XF belong to Chris Carter, FOX, and 1013 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: To Musea collectively; to Audrey Roget and Diana Battis, for wonderful suggestions, pointy sticks, and zipped lips; and to Mish, for under-the-wire beta and blessing. ~~~~~~~~ Sunset Visitation by mountainphile She waits until the peach-amber glow of late afternoon, when the day seems poised to die and the night is yet to awaken. Her morning goes to light desk duty at the office, her mid- day to sundry errands and chores. No more autopsies now. It fatigues her too much, on the fuller side of seven months, delivery on the horizon. Only twelve weeks since her lover's return and subsequent funeral, though she's mourned his absence far longer than that. The apartment is crisply quiet, taut like the military corners she learned to make as a little girl, tucked and smooth. Unplugged, the phone lies mute. She moistens her lips, relishing this time alone, when the baby within her is napping and her body aches to come alive again. It's become an almost daily ritual. She chooses the wide, soft couch in the living room, because it holds potent memories of him, of them melded together at dusk. A photo of him sits shadowed in its frame on the end table next to the lamp, which stays dark, untouched. She has no need for the light, even as it honeys and darkens and wanes in shortening shafts across the carpet. This is her time. Hanging to her knees, his old shirt is her covering of choice. It's the soft denim-blue oxford one, her favorite. The one that accentuates the green-gold of his eyes and the deep brown of his hair. Beneath it she's naked. Wide- banded maternity panties lay abandoned in a heap on the bathroom rug, along with the satin bra, which has grown a cup-size larger than her pre-pregnancy lingerie. She eases her body with its rounded belly onto the cushions and swings her legs up until she's resting lengthwise along the cool upholstery of the couch. Recumbent, slouched against a pillow, she holds her breath like a diver on the verge. Then, she flicks open the thin, milk-white buttons of the shirt one by one and parts her thighs. The hunger within her is voracious. Overwhelming. Whether from rampant hormones or simple grieving for his touch, she needs this time of release to feel whole and alive at the waning of yet another day alone, without him. Her pregnant body, she discovers, is both a comfort and a wellspring for nature's ingenuity. It calls for him. If she closes her eyes to focus, her fingers will lengthen and widen to clone his familiar shape. They browse her taut swollen breasts, slide into gaping wet depths. The tang of her fluids drifts up over the hill of her belly in a fragrant cloud. When she's finally able to smell him -- the clean, astringent odor of his semen merging with her own musky arousal, it's then that she sobs the loudest, the hardest, over her indescribable loss. She discovers a new thing one afternoon while stroking her breasts, moaning as the peach-bronze of the sky turns to rust. A drop of fluid, clear and yellowish, trembles like a jewel from her nipple. Colostrum, it's called, making an early appearance in her body. Touched with a fingertip, it has the thin, slick viscosity of pre-ejaculate, and her eyes prickle at this unexpected gift of solace. Milking a nipple, several large drops sparkle over her fingers. She brings them, like liquid diamonds, to the spongy folds of her vulva. Looking down, all she can see over her creamy swollen stomach are her pointed knees, parted wide. But she closes her eyes and goes by touch, feeling yet another layer of herself give way to him, dissolving into pleasure, as she rubs the liquid over and around and over her pulsing clitoris. His fingers, his cock, his mouth -- swirling ever faster in a whirlpool of peaking desire that leaves her weak and gasping. She clutches her vulva afterward, fingers protective over the last wrenching spasms, as if to prolong this moment. She wants to keep him with her. Her clitoris pings against the palm of her hand; the baby rocks in her womb. It's darker in the living room and her belly looks like a snowfield in moonlight. Chilled to gooseflesh, she remembers another snowfield long ago and blinks back fresh tears, pulling the blue shirt closed. He's gone now, his presence evaporated, ghost-like, into the evening air. Fingers and body are her own again, small and soft, ripe with the shifting tumescence of their child, hers and his. She waits until the next time, the next late, lonely afternoon, when she feels her heart breaking and the hunger in her body is beyond endurance. She draws the denim-blue shirt back over her skin and seeks out the couch, suffused with the darkening bronze of sunset. Opening her legs, she closes tired, swollen eyelids, beckoning her lost love to meet with her here in the dusk. And in that short, mystical space of time, when the old day dies and the sleepless night awakens, she looks for Mulder. ~~~~~~~~ The End Sunset Visitation by mountainphile March 1, 2001