Field Trip
“I just think I’ve… earned the benefit of the doubt, here.”
It is a long drive to the airport, all the longer because they spend it in awkward silence. When they’re assigned seats three rows apart on the commuter flight to Charlotte, neither of them makes any attempt to ask for a change.
Mulder is disappointed more than angry, but he won’t lie; there’s a little anger there, too. She’s just so goddamned stubborn. Any progress they might have made with their baseball outing has been completely undone in the week that followed. Scully seems almost pathologically determined to distance herself from him, and if he thought she were doing it because she truly wasn’t attracted to him or interested in him romantically, then he could respect that. He’d be sad, but he could accept it and try to pick up the pieces. He is 100% certain, however, that that’s not what’s going on here.
No, this is about control or fear or Catholic self-sacrifice or something. Probably a combination of things. But not one of them is genuine disinterest. He’s sure of that.
He promised himself he wouldn’t push, not least because he’d thought it would absolutely backfire, but now he’s beginning to doubt the certainty of that. Maybe they at least need to talk about it openly. If he can get at the root of whatever’s holding her back, maybe he can put forth a convincing counter-argument. He’s certainly already convinced himself.
Either way, whatever’s going on between them now has to stop. It doesn’t even feel like she’s his friend anymore, and that just straight-up sucks.
***