Honey Hi
by onpaperfirst

Rating:  Mature.

Feedback: onpaperfirst@gmail.com

Summary:  s11 / a spiritual sequel to Home, Home / more 
weirdo domesticity / scully moves back in

They'd probably admit she'd moved back in once she'd been 
living there for another twenty-five years.

Notes:  This story assumes that My Struggle IV never 
happened. Trust me, it's a good way to live.



"Lord, it's good to talk to you / Even sweeter than wine" 
-fleetwood mac, honey hi
 
xxx 

The thing about the internet is (among other things) that 
you can see something and have it at your front door the 
very next day. Which is how he ended up with two Himalayan 
salt lamps, because the deal was just too good. Did they 
purify the air/clear your sinuses/protect you from the 
radio waves of all the humming electronics in the house? 
Maybe, maybe not, but he liked the hazy pink glow, like a 
ship in the fog.

"You know these are a scam," Scully said from the bathroom, 
where the smaller lamp sat next to a spider plant they'd 
gotten right after they moved into the house, almost 
fifteen years earlier.

"What's a scam?" he asked, knowing full well what was a 
scam as he flopped down on the bed. He was tired. Maybe he 
was getting too old for all this travel. His rolling 
suitcase was tipped over on the floor. Scully's was 
downstairs. It was always a slow process with her, but the 
thresholds were slowly being re-crossed.

She came out, drying her hands. She looked pointedly at the 
second chunk of pink salt, this one glowing on the dresser. 
It looked like a clue on a mystical quest, like it had lit 
up when she answered a riddle correctly. She had a small 
grinder of the stuff in her pantry because her brand of 
being suckered tended toward food-bee pollen, acai berries, 
wheatgrass.

"They see you coming a mile away, Mulder." She shook the 
towel out before folding it and ducking back in to hang it 
up. She tidied up the bathroom every time she was there. 
There were never toothpaste flecks on the mirror anymore. 
Dana Scully was a Girl Scout and she left things better 
than she'd found them. Me included, Mulder thought, 
although he'd done a pretty good job of keeping himself fed 
and watered since she'd left.

When she came back out, he sat up and reached a hand out. 
With slight trepidation, she took it and sat down next to 
him.

"Doesn't it look pretty?" he said. The light outside was 
waning, a watery January sunset across the dead prairie 
grass.

"It's a scam," she whispered.

He tilted his head toward the lamp, which threw its rocky 
shadow on the wall, big as a cliff.

"It's nice," she conceded gently, feeling herself drifting, 
allowing herself to imagine kissing him under the covers in 
the tangerine glow.

"All I ask it to do is look pretty," he said. "If it 
happens to fix what ails me, that's just a bonus."

"And what ails you?"

"Oh, Scully," he said. She leaned her head against his 
shoulder. "How much time do you have?"

 
xxx

Most of it's made out of pressed chipboard and there has to 
be something bad, something immoral, somewhere in the 
supply chain to be able to buy a bookshelf for $19.99.

But the house is fucked. They're going to have to replace 
the banisters for sure. Well: *they?* He is. Maybe they. She 
spends a lot of time there now, in the house that's still 
technically in her name. Spends the night there, with him, 
in their big bed, doing nighttime, bedtime things. She has 
a toothbrush in a cup. Clothes on her side of the closet, 
merlot sweaters and black boots and something he knows is 
called athleisure, these tailored, slouchy sweatshirts. 
Books. Expensive moisturizers and face creams he tells her 
she doesn't need and she says they're the reason he thinks 
she doesn't need them.

But anyway: they. Were they back together? Oh god, what was 
he, fifteen? *Were they back together.* Ever since Esther 
Nairn, way back when, he figured he'd spend all eternity 
with his consciousness mingled with Scully's. But if that 
didn't come to pass, he'd settle for the nights he got to 
spend watching her put glycolic acid (5%) on her face 
before climbing into bed.

In any case, the banisters are shot, literally. Splintered 
all to hell. They cleaned up the blood and dug the bullets 
out of the wall. Cleaned up the easy stuff, stacks of 
papers and folders. They were both separately, silently 
angry at the framed photographs that had been sacrificed in 
the carnage, sweeping up broken glass and salvaging the 
pictures inside: William with his grandma; Samantha on the 
first day of school; William, two days old, in Mulder's 
arms, both of them asleep; an old one from their office.

Trash pickup was every other Wednesday way out here, so 
Mulder dragged the unsalvageable furniture out to the porch 
to wait. The total losses were a bookcase, two side tables, 
a lamp, and three chairs.


"They say Ikea's dangerous for relationships." It had taken 
them twenty minutes to find a parking spot.

"I think we can take our chances." Mulder wasn't sure if 
she meant that they'd faced bigger foes than Ikea on a 
Sunday or if they didn't have a relationship to endanger. 
"Probably an urban legend, anyway."

"Nah," he said, "it's because once you step inside, you 
lose all sense of time. It could be day, it could be night. 
It's like some kind of Gitmo tactic."

The doors slid open and Mulder wrangled a cart from the 
corral.

"They set up the little rooms and it makes you feel like 
you're at home," she said. "It dulls your senses. You 
forget you're in public. And all of a sudden you're in the 
middle of a fight about which rug matches the couch."

"Let's not fight in Ikea, Scully. It's so bourgeois."

 
Mulder knocked on the tabletop, rattled its slightly uneven 
showroom legs, as Scully checked its measurements with the 
free tape measure.

"It'll fit," she announced.

"I don't know," he said. "You hear that? Hollow."

"I mean, what's our goal here? Are we looking for family 
heirlooms? Or are we just looking for a table that'll give 
us a few good years?"

"I don't trust this one."

"So somewhere between a few good years and family 
heirloom."

"Let's get something that's made out of actual wood. Not 
that I'm saying it has to withstand an assassin's bullet, 
that feels like a lot to ask of a table, but I don't want 
to lose a leg too early in the game."


Mulder hummed along to "Easy Lover," bumping his hip into 
Scully as they wound their way through the store, following 
the arrows on the floor. They used to look at babies, 
toddlers, but now they surreptitiously watched teenagers, 
slouching on their phones, shoving each other into 
displays, being told by their parents to pick up the 
pillows they'd thrown on the floor.


"It's too goth," Scully said, frowning at the armchair. 
Mulder sat in it like a king.

"Since when are you an expert on what's goth and what's 
not? Maybe that's the aesthetic I'm going for. Aging 
Dracula."

"Aging Dracula is an oxymoron. And I know what goth is, 
Mulder. I wear a lot of black. Anyway, don't I get a say?"

They'd probably admit she'd moved back in once she'd been 
living there for another twenty-five years.

"Scully says it's too goth for her home. Got it. On to the 
next." He said it breezily, quickly, as he got up from the 
chair, and hope pulsed in her chest.


"So what about organizing?" Scully said. They'd either been 
there thirty minutes or ten hours, Scully couldn't tell. 
"We live here now," she'd said to him as they got stuck in 
a traffic jam in rugs.

"What about it?"

Everyone around them was incredibly optimistic. Their carts 
were stacked high with boxes and incredibly specific 
storage solutions. Put your shoes on this, your jewelry on 
this, your towels here, your coffee mugs there. A better, 
cleaner, more efficient life was just within reach.

"I mean files. Paperwork." For a while, she'd led a one-
woman campaign for him to buy a scanner and a shredder.

"We cleaned it up."

She looked at him darkly.

"I'm radically analog, Scully."

"Right. But what if we tempered that with some Simple 
Storage Solutions." She Vanna White-ed the sign hanging 
from the rafters. "We could see this as an opportunity."

"I have filing cabinets."

"Yes. You do. Have you heard of feng shui, Mulder?"

"The metal filing cabinets are balanced by my corkboard and 
the cardboard box of VHS tapes. Yin and yang, Scully. It 
all works in perfect harmony."

"I'm going to get some of these and we'll see how we feel." 
She put four flatpack boxes, the kind that the Simple 
Storage Solutions sign pictured stacked in a stylish home 
office, and two wicker baskets in the cart.

"I'm not putting files in wicker baskets."

"I'm not suggesting that."

"Files go in filing cabinets."

"So rigid," she said. "Where's your sense of adventure?"


The potted plants were too much to resist, a miniature, 
drooping jungle in a warehouse in the middle of winter. "We 
have to save them," Scully said. She had a weakness for a 
yellowing leaf, soil that was a tiny bit dry, these mass-
produced plants waiting on a pathetic shelf to be adopted.

She scooped up a pothos, hearty but poisonous; a snake 
plant, its leaves sharp as daggers; two tiny succulents 
that had no business in Virginia; an orchid that she'd feed 
a single ice cube once a week; and a good luck jade.

 
xxx

They'd met in the parking garage of the Watergate once, 
which felt a little on the nose, but Scully had been 
willing to play along. She guessed they were Woodward and 
Bernstein in this scenario, but who could tell?

If the house on Wallace Road was going to be connected to 
any sort of liminal space, it might as well have been a 
subterranean parking garage. A place of echoes, shadows, 
surreptitious meetings, a place that ate cell signals, all 
of them seemingly designed by the same depressed brutalist 
architect who wanted you to forget where you parked.

Reggie would've been vexing to most people, but they'd once 
spent a year that seemed to fold in and in on itself like 
an origami snake, things happening and unhappening over and 
over. An oceanliner crawling with Nazis; Morris Fletcher in 
the Nevada desert; a bloody Christmas Eve; Mulder shot on 
the floor of a Craddock Marine Bank; a mycologic system in 
North Carolina that sucked them down into the soil. Reggie 
was nothing.

They fell asleep on the couch. Ancient humans would wake in 
the middle of the night and so did they, to pull a blanket 
over themselves and talk quietly.

"What do you remember?" he asked, curled behind her, always 
adapting his size to hers.

"Mmmm," she said, half-awake. "I remember frogs falling 
from the sky." Their pale, fat bellies had sounded like big 
raindrops on her umbrella, summoned by your friendly 
neighborhood Satanists.

"Remember the invisible man and his boat?"

Scully groaned quietly. "He really was invisible, Mulder." 
Her nose twitched, thinking of the yellow lycopodium powder 
that had revealed the curves of his face.

"I know he was. I love hunting aliens with you," he 
whispered into her neck.

"Me, too," she said, holding his hand in the warm space 
between her breasts. "Even though they're not real."

She knew that they were, of course, but why not.

 
xxx

"Relax, Libra, you've earned it. Take a moment to 
contemplate all that you've done and to appreciate the hard 
work that it took. But don't become complacent. Your next 
task is on the horizon. Meet it with joy."

Scully was cross-legged on the bed in a baby-soft old 
Yankees t-shirt, drinking strong coffee with unsweetened 
almond milk and looking altogether angelic in the fuzzy 
Sunday morning light. He sometimes felt like he was trying 
not to startle a deer in the backyard. He didn't want to 
move too fast, make any noises. What if she ran?

"Now read mine."

"You want to hear your horoscope."

"I don't actually think it can tell me anything, Mulder, 
but I also think that things like horoscopes are devalued 
not on the basis of whether or not they're true, but 
because they're seen as traditionally female, and 
traditionally female pursuits are routinely mocked and 
devalued for no other reason than the fact that women enjoy 
them."

"Cassandra's prophecies were doomed to be disbelieved and 
yet John Dee got to read the stars and pick the Queen's 
coronation date."

"Exactly. Go on." She poked at him with her foot. He shook 
the paper out with just a little too much fanfare and 
cleared his throat.

"You sometimes take things too hard, Pisces. It's never a 
bad thing to give yourself an honest appraisal, but for 
you, sensitive fish, that sometimes takes the form of all 
stick and no carrot. Self-compassion is the order of the 
day."

"Hmm. According to Melissa, our signs are quincunx, which 
means they don't have any attributes in common but they're 
drawn to each other with an intense shared purpose."

The five dots on a die were quincunx and so was the 
infield, with the pitcher's mound in the middle.

"Your sister knew my sign?"

He'd only met Melissa a few times. On the surface, they had 
nothing in common, Melissa and Dana, the mystic and the 
scientist. But when Scully was dying under a white sheet in 
the ICU, Melissa had yanked him out of his dark lair and 
forced him to go to her. They both looked like Renaissance 
paintings.

"She said she sensed something. You know," Scully waved her 
hand. "Between us."

*"Us?"*

"I know. Can you imagine?"

Scully set the mug ("Little Dam Mug," from an on-the-lam 
visit to the Hoover Dam) on the nightstand and got back 
under the covers.

"Brrr," she said, as Mulder pulled her close. Her feet were 
cold.

"To be fair, we were pretty disgusting back then." Once 
Mulder had caught their reflection in the round security 
mirror hung in the corner of a courthouse hallway. They 
were waiting to testify, talking about the case or the 
breakfast burritos they'd gotten downstairs or the weather. 
Their black coats melded into one and they were positively 
panting at each other.

"Speak for yourself. I was extremely professional."

"When did you know you were in trouble?"

"I mean, I'd known you for something like thirty-six hours 
and I dropped my bathrobe so you could look at mosquito 
bites."

"Thank you for that, by the way."

She'd smelled like clean Oregon dirt and the tail end of 
the perfume she'd put on in the morning. The power going 
out had seemed prophetic and she peeled the robe off like 
she was presenting herself as a sacrifice. Like she'd 
bathed in milk and then there she was, dripping 
phosphorescent white on the motel carpet.

"I wasn't trying anything, you know that, Mulder."

"Of course not."

"I just knew I could trust you."

He was some kind of evolved species of man. He seemed to 
have slipped out of the swamp of American masculinity and 
crawled to the shore unashamed of his own gentleness and 
with his tender heart on his sleeve. Sure, he'd killed 
people and he'd killed them for her, but nobody's perfect.

"I knew I could trust you, too," he said, nuzzling his head 
into her arm like a friendly animal. His whole life story 
had tumbled out that night. He knew it was partially 
because he wanted to scare her away-*so you think you want 
to do this?*-but she was a careful listener. She never 
turned away, never broke his gaze. *Oh shit,* he remembered 
thinking. *Oh shit.*

Mulder's hand roamed lazily beneath the covers.

"Scully, you forgot your pants."

"Oh no. What am I going to do about that?"

They kissed. Long, Sunday morning kisses, because they were 
dating, even though they'd known each other for twenty-five 
years and they'd been married for sixteen of those and they 
had a son.

"So should I find my pants? Or should I lose my shirt?"

"Shh," he said, kissing down her jaw. "I'm trying to meet 
my next task with joy."

 
xxx

The guest room was painted gray because blue would've been 
too on the nose. When they painted it, William was three 
and a half. It had a twin bed and a lamp covered in 
constellations. Did he like dinosaurs? Did he like outer 
space? Better to keep things plain rather than guess.


They sat there, the little lamp printing stars on the 
walls. He was sixteen now, almost seventeen. He was lanky 
like Mulder, a reluctant visionary like Scully. Out there 
somewhere. The room would be okay. The room would be okay 
if he needed it, if he came home.

 
xxx

The wine was from one of the many Scully cousins. Mulder 
could never keep their names straight, but this was one of 
the younger ones, the surprise, "late-in-life baby" 
belonging to her Aunt Mitzi, whose real name was Mary Ann. 
The baby cousin had decided to become a vintner or a 
sommelier out in Napa and had sent really good bottles of 
wine to everyone in the family for Christmas. He asked for 
nothing in return but a good Yelp review.

Scully was giggly after a glass and a half. He'd made pasta 
because neither of them had the energy for anything more 
after a flight back from Kentucky. She hadn't even made a 
pretense of going anywhere but there when they left Dulles.

She came up behind him at the sink and wrapped her arms 
around him.

"Hi," he said, rinsing marinara off a plate.

"Hi," she said to his back. She kissed him between his 
shoulder blades and pushed off to lean against the counter 
next to him.

"You know what I was thinking about?" she said, topping her 
wine glass up.

"Your Yelp review for the wine?"

She held the glass up to the light, swirling it.

"Complex, autumnal...full-bodied."

"I'll say," he said, squeezing her hips as he moved past to 
put leftover salad in the fridge.

"Mm, thank you. No. I was actually thinking about the FBI's 
most unwanted."

"Oh-kayyyy," he said. She laughed her jangly, loose laugh. 
He might not have even remembered the first thing he said 
to her, but she never forgot and it made her laugh, his 
serious, James Bond-in-the-FBI line, waiting at his desk 
for her to knock.

"It's cute!" she said. "Don't be embarrassed."

"If I'd known I'd still be answering for it twenty-five 
years later, I would've said something else."

"You know what you should've said?"

"Come in, the door's open?"

"Nobody down here but the FBI's most wanted."

"And why is that?"

"Oh, because I wanted you."

His throat went dry and he got a glass of water from the 
sink. They'd been together-together for most of eighteen 
years. But the thought of soft, long-haired, baby-faced 
Scully in her brand new Special Agent suit still stopped 
him in his tracks.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm as he turned 
around.

"So what if I'd said that. What would you have done?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." There was an edge of 
nervousness in her voice, he was pleased to hear, and she 
took a gulp of wine.

"I really would."

"Well. I would've started out the same. I would've 
introduced myself."

"Only polite."

"I'm extremely polite."

"So go ahead."

"What?"

"Introduce yourself."

She balked for a minute, then set down her glass, squared 
up and put her hand out. He shook it, firmly, pulling her 
slightly closer to him.

"I'm Special Agent Dana Scully. I'm your new partner."

Keeping her hand in his grip, he pulled her even closer.

"I don't need a partner," he said. "I work alone."

She haughtily extracted her hand and crossed her arms.

"Your reputation precedes you, Agent Mulder. And I think it 
sounds like you could use a partner. What's that on the 
desk?"

Mulder looked behind him, as though he were really going to 
see something.

"Were you doing research on me?"

"And what if I was?"

"Then what did you find out about me, Special Agent 
Mulder?"

"You're smart."

He walked her backwards, up against the wall. But not 
touching her yet, not pressing into her. She breathed hard, 
looking up at him.

"Of course I am. What else."

"You're open-minded."

"I think you're pushing it, Agent Mulder."

"Am I?"

She'd thought about this back then, about the things 
Mulder, a prolific watcher of porn at the time, would think 
to do to her in their hidden office. He said absolutely 
filthy things back then, in her head, at night.

He stepped closer, leaning into her. She could feel him 
hard against her already. He put his hands on the wall, on 
either side of her head. She reached down and pressed her 
hand against him, rubbing up and down. He inhaled, the 
sharp, teeth-together sound of burning your hand.

"Mm, hi," she said, stepping out of character for a second. 
Then: "What is it about me that seems so open-minded, Agent 
Mulder?"

"Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?" he 
asked, his hips slowly grinding on each word.

"Sounds spooky," she said. "You might have to convince me." 
She gently ran her fingernails over his chest. "You know, 
I've heard things about you, Agent Mulder."

"All lies," he said as he ran his hands up and underneath 
her blouse. "Rumors and hearsay."

"I heard you're a little crazy," she said. "I heard you're 
dangerous."

"Is this crazy?" His tongue was in her mouth and his hands 
were unbuttoning her pants.

"Tell me what to do," she breathed in his ear.

"Sit on the desk, Agent Scully. We need to see how well we 
can work together."

She slipped up on the table. She sat on a fork.

"Ow!" She threw the fork on the floor as Mulder stepped 
between her legs, his pants half-off.

"Are you okay?" He rubbed her leg with concern, inspecting 
it. She laughed, leaning her head on his chest. He reached 
around her and pushed the bowls and silverware away.

"I guess you heard right," he said, bringing out a faint 
cowboy drawl, "I guess I'm dangerous."

 
xxx

Two keys hung lonely on the square, modern hook in her 
square, modern kitchen for four years. One for the bottom 
lock, which always stuck, and one for the deadbolt, which 
had been installed upside down, so you had to make sure you 
remembered to turn the teeth of the key the wrong way.

He'd given her a spare to his apartment on Hegal Place 
after they'd been partners for two months. She'd never even 
exchanged keys with a boyfriend. It was supposed to be a 
sign of maturity, of a next step in commitment, but the 
thought of giving someone unfettered access to her house 
gave her hives. After Tooms, she went to the little 
hardware store on the corner of her block and had a copy 
made for Mulder. She'd scrubbed her bathroom twice and 
still smelled bile.

She put the keys back on her keychain. She let herself in.

 
xxx

It had been in a bargain bin at the last gas station before 
the house. Three for $9.99 but she just bought the one.

"No way," he said, flipping the case over. Téa Leoni and 
Garry Shandling were in moody silhouette on the front. The 
blurbs on the back were heavily ellipsed. Apparently there 
weren't any reviews that could be quoted for more than four 
words at a time.

Neither of them had seen it since the premiere nearly 
twenty years earlier in LA. It had been May, jacaranda 
blossoms popping under their heels, obscenely pink 
bougainvillea spilling over freeway walls. Paper white 
mornings burned off by midday with the scent of creamy 
honeysuckle. They had never been happier.

Mulder started unwrapping the DVD immediately.

"We don't have to *watch* it, Mulder," she said. "I just 
wanted to get it off the streets. Out of circulation."

"Oh, we're watching it, Scully. Peter Travers says, 
'Interesting, dot dot dot, sci-fi for, dot dot dot, a 
modern age.'"

"Well, here. I got these." She dug Red Vines and Peanut 
Butter M&Ms out of her bag and tossed them to him.

 
"Oh god, why are we doing this?" Scully pressed her face 
into a pillow as the credits started, backed by steel drums 
and a wavy theramin.

"This is an important part of our history."

"Well, that's vaguely humiliating."

"How many people have a B-movie based on them, Scully?"

"This is C-movie at best. I wish they'd at least given us 
fake names."

On screen, there was the click of a lighter. The filter 
crackled. A jeweled mitre appeared in a haze of smoke.

*"Power belongs to those who take it. You should know that 
by now."* The Cigarette Smoking Pontiff had a craggy face 
only a deity could love. *"So get me the Lazarus bowl."*


 
"That is not how an autopsy is done! Did they even bother 
to do the most rudimentary research?"

"Shh," Mulder said. "I think they're going to kiss."

She slapped his arm with a Red Vine.

"Look at that. It looks like she's using a pizza cutter!"


*"If the Cancer Priest gets the bowl, Mulder-" 
"So you're admitting that the bowl has powers?" 
"He believes that the bowl has powers." 
"Scully, you're a devout Roman Catholic. Don't you believe 
in the bowl?"*  


"This is a hate crime, Mulder."

"I wish we'd kept one of those souvenir Lazarus bowls. We 
could be eating popcorn out of it right now."


"All I'm saying is that it doesn't make sense for her to 
choose Skinner. It just doesn't!"

"Oh, *now* you're worried about verisimilitude. You're fine 
with zombies and gloveless autopsies and a subplot about me 
contemplating leaving the FBI and becoming a nun, but you 
draw the line here."

"Mulder's a dark hero. There's no way she'd pick a pencil-
pushing bureaucrat over that."

She rolled her eyes. "It's science fiction."

"That sullies the good name of science fiction. I need a 
beer."

"You should've listened to me!" she called to him as he 
opened the fridge in a huff.


"Goodnight, my dark hero."

"So that's gonna stick, huh?"

"Yeah, I think it's gonna stick."

 
xxx

The succulents lived on the back porch, straining their 
little leaves for sun. Ikea was too cheap to provide genus 
information, but they'd looked it up and one was an 
echevaria, the platonic ideal of a succulent, and the other 
was a bluish-green sedum. Mulder took a spray bottle out 
once a week and misted them.

 
xxx

They swayed gently. A green branch would bend but wouldn't 
break. The floor creaked and the wind sighed in the eaves. 
The house settled around them.

"What are we dancing to?" she asked, her arms looped around 
his neck like last call would never come. No music but 
their bare feet on the floor.

There was a record player because Mulder had decided vinyl 
was the way to go, a rejection of our digital overlords. He 
liked used records better, with their reassuring clicks and 
pops. Wild Horses. Nothing Compares 2 U. Thirteen by Big 
Star. Joy Division if he was feeling moody while he did the 
dishes. 

"Whatever you want."

"Ah. But what if we're not dancing to the same thing?"

"Never stopped us before."

She tilted her chin on his sternum and looked up at his 
kind, witchy eyes, at the face she'd known for going on 
half her life.

"Where'd you come from?"

"I could ask you the same thing."

"Mulder." She stopped swaying and squeezed him.

"Scully. Yes?"

"Marry me."

He brushed her hair back from her face.

"We're already married."

"Let's do it again."

"You wanna go on a honeymoon this time?"

They'd been on the road for a week when he'd asked her to 
marry him. They were panicked they'd never see each other 
again and it seemed like one thing they could do as a ward 
against danger, as if a wedding ring worked like a clove of 
garlic or a horseshoe tacked above the doorway.

"I just want to make sure you know. I'm in this with you, 
Mulder."

He nodded. He knew.

"If we find him, if we don't find him. Me and you."

"We might have to pay for college, you know. College and 
braces."

"I'll take the risk."

"So you want to make a doubly honest man out of me?"

 
xxx

The guest room was still gray. The lamp was a little 
babyish, but he didn't hate the stars it illuminated on the 
ceiling. It was quiet and dark out here, the closest house 
a half a mile down the road. She said they could go 
shopping, that he could do whatever he wanted with the 
room. There was a quilt folded on the foot of the bed that 
had "William" embroidered on the edge. He slept. He didn't 
dream.