Retam Sullet - Part Three

The next time Frohike saw either of them they were kissing. One of Thea's fists was wrapped in Langly's wet hair and his head was bent back uncomfortably. Ringo's eyelids were fluttering - he looked, in that second, as if Thea's kisses had a narcotic effect. It took Melvin Frohike aback, but he supposed they'd had their talk.

And they had, such as it was.

Ringo, red eyed, the left side of his face a vivid blue bruise, smelling of sweat, sleep, and medicine, let himself into her room to find her bent over, pulling jeans up over her naked ass.

She turned around, mildly surprised.

SORRY. He had practiced signing an apology all the way to her room so he was ready when he burst in on her.

NO BIG. YOU OKAY, RINGO? Her brow wrinkled as she signed.

I FEEL LIKE CRAP BUT I DON'T THINK I NEED TO FILE FOR PERMANENT DISABILITY, IF THAT'S WHAT YOU MEAN. HOW ARE YOU FEELING? he signed, staring at her flat stomach.

MY CERVIX IS TIGHTLY CLOSED AND MY UTERUS IS LARGE AND HARD, MY BLOOD IS HIGH IN IRON, LOW IN SUGAR, AND CHOCK FULL OF HUMAN CHORIONIC GONADATROPIN, MY BLOOD PRESSURE IS LOW, AND CHUCK SAYS I HAVE THE HEART RATE OF A TREE SLOTH. HE MADE ME DRINK THE GROSSEST DRINK - here she shook her shoulders and stuck out her tongue in revulsion - AND I'VE GIVEN SO MUCH BLOOD AND URINE I THINK I'VE BEEN CLEARED TO RUN IN THE KENTUCKY DERBY. She shook her hands when she was done.

THAT'S COOL BUT, UM, he faltered, HOW DO YOU FEEL?

HUNGRY? she signed.

YOU PISSED AT ME?

NO, she signed and shook her head at the same time. Biting the inside of her cheek she went on, YOU MAD AT ME?

He shook his head back at her. He took a deep breath in preparation for what he was about to tell her. T, I LOVE YOU.

She waited a moment, then signed, YOU LOVE THE BABY TOO?

He fidgeted. I'LL LOVE THE BABY WHEN IT GETS HERE.

BUT YOU DON'T HATE IT? YOU PLAN ON LOVING IT?

He pushed his glasses up and smiled, albeit unconvincingly. CHUCK WANTS TO GIVE YOU AN ULTRASOUND. WOULD IT BE COOL IF I WAS THERE WITH YOU?

He must have said the right thing, because Thea took this as her cue to grab Langly roughly and kiss him thoroughly, forgetting for a moment about his jaw.

As soon as she let him go he signed, MIND IF I TAKE A SHOWER? I'D LIKE TO BE DRESSED THE FIRST TIME I SEE MY KID.

His kid, Langly thought. It looked weird, it sounded weird, it *was* weird. But with the two of them for parents, it was bound to be a weird kid.

In some way he couldn't quite explain, Langly found that thought very comforting.

~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~

Langly hated the ultrasound even before it started. The light was off in Froman's room and Thea liked light.

Burkes explained that because she was so early it would be necessary to do the ultrasound internally. Which meant he took a slender wand attached to the monitor by a short coiled cord, rolled a condom onto it, slathered the thing in blue conductive goo and put it in her.

Langly thought he was going to faint. Thea looked bored.

Ringo reached out and held her hand. She spelled into his palm. YOU OKAY?

He shook his head. YOU? DOES IT HURT?

PLEASE, she signed shaking her head and she rolled her eyes trying keep still for the exam, YOU ARE EASILY TWICE THE DIAMETER OF THAT PROBE AND YOU DON'T HURT ME.

Ringo was embarrassed. He knew he was utterly average and the probe was small. Thea was no delicate flower. What was wrong with him?

Suddenly Burkes spoke. "Well look at that, you don't see that every day. Actually, I personally have never seen that before. Wow."

Langly practically jumped out of his skin. "What?!?!"

RINGO? Thea signed, looking panicked. WHAT'S WRONG?

"Sorry, that was unprofessional of me," Burkes said, straightening himself. He looked at Thea and shook his head. "There isn't a problem," he said, enunciating each word very carefully. He gave her the thumbs up. "Everything looks great."

Langly blinked. He felt as if something was squeezing his brain. "So everything is okay? Normal?"

Burkes shook his head. "Not normal, no. More like unusual." He nodded toward the monitor, then held up three fingers as he smiled. "What you've got here is triplets."

Langly made a conscious effort to slow his breathing despite the feeling of vertigo that seized him. "Triplets? She's going to have three uuhhh three uuhh--"

Thea's eyes grew wide. THREE? She signed

"Three, yes. Which is unusual without fertility treatment." Burkes pointed to a few dark bean-shaped areas on the screen that, to Langly, looked no different than the rest of the image. "One, two, three. There is an increased risk of spontaneous abortion with multiple pregnancies, but she's in great physical shape, really great shape." He turned his attention to Thea again. "Your blood sugar is low, hematocrit high, large pelvic opening. It's almost like you were designed for this. The only weird part is. . ." Chuck's voice trailed off.

Langly swallowed. "What?"

"See this?" Chuck drew both their attention to the screen. "These are the babies and-" he pointed slightly higher on the screen "-this is the placenta."

"Why is that weird?"

"One placenta means they started out as a single zygote. Which means they're identical. Identical triplets. Most midwives or OBs never see a case like this. "This is the opportunity of a lifetime." He slipped the wand out and tossed the condom in Frohike's wastepaper basket. "I have to thank Frohike for calling me in."

"Let me tell her about it, okay?" Langly told Burkes.

"Sure," Burkes agreed as he helped Thea off the bed and began packing his equipment. "This is incredible, though, Langly. Special. Make sure she knows that."

He tried. He really did. He didn't know if he succeeded. It didn't matter what was going on in her head, most of the time Thea had three whole facial expressions in her repertoire, which Langly privately named The Big Scully Smile, The Mannequin, and The Crying Like a Duck. He didn't know if he was relieved or disappointed that he got The Mannequin.

I THINK HE MIGHT BE RIGHT. I THINK I WAS DESIGNED TO DO IT LIKE THAT she signed, after wiping herself indelicately with Frohike's bed sheet, standing and buttoning her jeans. I THINK IT EVEN MAKES SENSE.

The rest of the day was strange and uncomfortable. The Gunmen worked on the paper because it gave them something to do, but they spoke as little as possible.

Langly tried to work on a piece he had researched on the link between specific food additives and violent behavior, but somehow he wound up reinforcing the group's many internet firewalls, instead. Having finished that, he made sure every office chair in the place rolled freely and provided optimal lumbar support. He didn't realize it, but in his own unique way, he was already anxiously nesting.

Thea, for her part, drank a gallon of milk while furiously typing on the floor while Langly worked on her chair. Her article was fairly typical for her - a Marxist deconstruction of the capitalist propaganda content of the latest Saturday morning cartoon. Byers would have to edit for length and readability and it would inevitably wind up being about a third of its original length. She kept herself busy, just in case Langly was trying to ignore her.

Langly spent the day practically pining to ask her to play the new game he'd gotten fresh from Hong Kong that afternoon but he was so worried what the guys would say he couldn't. Around midnight he gave up - but instead of proposing a simulated fight to the death he stood beside her monitor and signed WANT TO GO TO BED?

BEST OFFER I'VE HAD TODAY, she signed. NIGHT GUYS, she signed to the other two, who bade them goodnight with studious carelessness.

Langly made certain to look them both in the face, nervously defiant, as he led her away by the hand.

~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~

His bedroom door at her back, Thea unceremoniously stripped off her shirt and made an attempt to engage Langly in their traditional out-of-the-other-guy's-eyeshot liplock.

She did not seem to understand his problem. Perhaps certain intricacies of human sexual behavior were permanently beyond her grasp.

Not even a full two months away from her virginity, she was fluent in the mechanics of sex. Thea held a solid understanding of touch and pressure. She knew that her lips on her lover's nipple would bring his hands to her hair with Pavlovian dependability. She knew from experience that three slow wet circuits along his shaft with her tongue would leave him shuddering and unable to sign. She had no idea why he was looking at her that way. Afraid. Like they had never done this before.

But as far as he was concerned, they hadn't.

Before that day he had been aroused and impressed by her utter lack of sexual shame. At that particular moment, he was horrified that she realized Fro and Byers knew what they were about to do and she didn't care at all.

Besides, she was pregnant.

She had no idea that, even under ideal circumstances, he spent at least a half an hour after sex feeling guilty. She had never been able to decide exactly what he meant when he signed 'dirty,' since it seemed to mean both too perverse to contemplate and too pleasurable to pass up. It had taken him almost a month to work up the nerve to ask for fellatio. He would have been begging for it every day after that but she was so eager he didn't have a chance.

Thea Fidelis had spent her first five years of life in a Plexiglas tank. The information she received in the topic of sex was no more biased than the information wires fed into her brain on a thousand other topics. She had strong urges herself since her fifth year out of the tank. Later, in her life above water, she saw women try to use sex to save themselves and fail miserably. Tiresome, risky, and they didn't seem to enjoy it. The entire thing seemed stupid. The trouble was she had been designed for sex, to desire it, to excel at it. She was also designed to rank the welfare of her loved ones above her own. She was a praetorian and despite the modifications that had been made to the original model, she was her father's daughter.

From the beginning she noticed things about Langly. The way sometimes his pupils would grow wide when they were wrestling. The way his gaze rested on her several seconds longer than it ever fell on Frohike or Byers. She had a certain t-shirt that was tighter than most of her others, and when she wore it, he would frequently put an abrupt end to wrestling mid-game with some completely lame excuse. He was different. He had those feelings Gibson lacked. Though she hadn't believed they were aimed at her.

Until the kiss.

Overnight, a world that had been sepia toned became vivid Technicolor. For Thea, it was the difference between knowing the atomic weight of carbon and holding a perfect diamond in her hand. Once she put her research into practice with the object of her adoration, her sexual feelings were roughly as conflicted as the average golden retriever's.

The situation was somewhat different for her lover.

Richard Langly received a wealth of messages about sex in his early life, most of them contradictory. His parents produced seven children but he had only ever seen them kiss on the cheek. Inseminating cows was a yearly activity on the farm, but human reproduction was a skillfully avoided topic. Little Ringo watched Captain Toby longer than he'd believed in God. Still, somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand Sundays spent keeping a church pew warm took their toll. He might have been an iconoclast, a rabble rouser, and an undoubted atheist, but somewhere beneath it all, he was a nice God-fearing Lutheran boy.

Marybeth Langly's grip extended beyond the grave and all the way to Takoma Park, Maryland, when her son looked at the topless girl beckoning him from the bed. He couldn't talk. He couldn't sign. The only thing he didn't have a problem doing was getting it up. 'Chagrined' may not have been the right word, but it was close.

Another realization pummeled him. Exactly two people claimed to love him in his entire life. One had given birth to him. The other was laying on his bed, the signs of his residence not yet apparent, but he was growing in her, too. He wasn't used to thinking in those kinds of terms.

It made his head hurt, but Byers was right - he'd feel a lot better if they got married. She didn't seem much like a wife, but then he wasn't exactly promising husband material himself. He'd never want to spend the rest of his life stuck with a wifey-type chick, anyway. But then, if he married Thea, she'd be his wife.

If he had been one of those androids from the original Star Trek series, he would have blown up already.

He closed his eyes and tried thinking it through again.

He'd spent his entire adult life bitching about not getting laid; it looked like that one had turned around and bit him on the ass in a big way. It was one of those things that left him feeling remarkably clueless. Marriage? Kids ? He'd seemed pretty safely distanced from the possibility until Thea came along.

A scene from his boyhood sprang to mind. He was 14, listening to music in his room when his father called him to the kitchen table.

He could hear the low rough voice even now. "Take this as a warning, Ringo. You get some girl bad off, like Tommy did Meg, and you're gonna marry her. Don't think you're too good to pay for your mistakes."

His mother made him jump running her palm down the back of his neck and granting him her unsolicited vote of confidence. "Ritchie wouldn't do that, would you, Baby?"

His father had actually laughed. "Marybeth, this fool'll get in trouble with the first girl dumb enough to let him."

But things with Tom and Meg seemed to work out okay. And if Tom Langly could do it at 18, Richard Langly could do it at 37.

He hoped.

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched Thea casually playing with her nipples. Oh lord, he could so do this. He ran his finger along the top edge of her jeans then dropped his head in defeat.

Byers and Frohike were still out there, still knew what they were doing. I'M SORRY, he signed to her I JUST...I CAN'T...THE GUYS, THEY KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING, GOING TO DO.

She looked at him curiously. IF THEY DIDN'T GUESS AFTER THE PREGNANT THING, IT WOULD BE KIND OF PATHETIC.

He didn't know what to say to that.

IT DOESN'T MAKE YOU FEEL WEIRD? he signed.

NO. WHY? SHOULD IT? She stretched on the small bed. FROHIKE BRINGS HOME WOMEN SOMETIMES. REMEMBER THAT REALLY DUMB ONE, DOT? YOU DIDN'T THINK THEY WERE READING SPINOZA IN HIS ROOM, DID YOU?

She had him there. He shrugged.

WILL YOU MAKE ME COME? She unbuttoned her pants. OR DO I HAVE TO DO IT MYSELF?

Langly swallowed hard. RIGHT HERE IN FRONT OF ME? he signed, fascinated and scandalized. He thought it was possibly the hottest offer he'd had in his life. He felt slightly faint.

IT'S NOT LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN ME HAVE AN ORGASM, she signed casually.

He removed his shoes and sat vigilantly at the foot of the bed. She seemed surprised that it interested him so much. She slipped her hand down the front of her jeans, actually, she was wearing his pants, his jeans, her hand, her hot wet... ohgodohgod. He leaned forward in hope of getting closer look.

TAKE THEM OFF, he signed, tapping her knee.

She arched her eyebrow.

YOUR PANTS. SO I CAN SEE BETTER. I MEAN, IF YOU WANT TO, IF IT'S OKAY, he back-pedaled.

She grinned the big grin and slipped them off. When her back arched mid-strip, he thought for a brief second that he was going to have to get his inhaler.

The first two fingers on her left hand were rubbing little circles on her clit. He watched enraptured, not even aware his right hand was pressing intermittently against his straining erection. Thea, however, noticed and was suddenly exponentially more aroused.

WILL YOU OPEN YOUR- ? He faltered. He had a hard time with descriptive terms for female anatomy.

IF YOU GET OUT YOUR PENIS, she signed stopping her hand for a moment.

She spread her labia.

He loved her hands. They were elegant, with long, tapered fingers and perfect blunted ovals for nails, even if the edges tended to be ragged and chewed. A chick's hands.

Her clit was firmly between two fingertips, like a cigarette. He'd never seen anything like that in a movie. It was possibly the coolest thing he'd seen in his life. How could he marry a chick like that? It would be like finding the rarest, most beautiful butterfly.

Then sticking a pin straight through its chest.

He struggled to throw off the sickening glare of Self-consciousness even as he watched Thea's fluttering fingers, like this was his own personal porno movie. He could all but feel her gaze stroking him. It was easily the dirtiest thing he'd done in his life.

Sure, he was uncomfortable but not uncomfortable enough to stop, not as long as her hand was moving, not as long as his eyes were on her.

Then she started making that noise, that muted but insistent whining that seemed to emanate from the hollow of her throat and meant orgasm was no more than ten seconds away.

He forgot to feel vulnerable, unattractive, and ashamed.

Like that he fell, his hand a blur, his pale eyelashes fluttering. His shoulders hunched and his hips jerked. White pearls of semen began to jet everywhere, spilling in surges on Ringo's hand, abdomen, and bed.

He was still shaking and stuttering when she took his hand in hers and licked it clean. By the time her tongue had moved on to collect the shining drops from the stream of light red hair that stretched to his navel, he was no longer shivering, but gasping like a fish in the bottom of a boat.

"Oh Oh Oh," he whispered.

THAT WAS THOROUGHLY ENJOYABLE, she signed, smiling broadly at him.

He wasn't sure whether he felt like he'd robbed a bank or won the lottery.

John Byers did not immediately start to watch Ringo and Thea closely; he simply began to pay unobtrusive attention to what he would have noted peripherally only a short time before. Only the smallest of visible changes had taken place. They still spent most of their time at their monitors - intent, focused - or leaning over the same keyboard, all their touches inconsequential, glancing.

All this time, he had assumed that Langly was attentive and lacking his ever-present sarcasm with Thea because she was young, female, and handicapped. Byers had been dead wrong. He failed to take into account how often Langly looked at her, or how often he brought her things - ideas, articles, games, new software - and when something caught her fancy, the man would get that smug 'just hacked the D.O.D.' look. He took suggestions from her that, coming from anyone else, would have merited a resounding 'fuck you.'

His uneasy conclusion was that their behavior didn't seem to have changed at all. Thea and Langly had been in love for some time.

Byers used to think all Gunmen were equal in Thea's eyes. No more. She gazed at Langly, Byers realized, just like Mulder gazed at Scully. She jumped to his defense even when he didn't exactly deserve it. She also scrutinized him from the very beginning. He was unsettled to recall the day, just a few months after her arrival, when she observed conversationally that Ringo would eat anything red. He would. It was true. But in 16 years neither he nor Frohike had ever spent enough time thinking about their associate's eating habits to draw that conclusion. She couldn't get her clothes washed without prodding but she could keep a painstaking mental record of Langly's asthma attacks and myriad allergies. She never put Frohike in a headlock.

He'd always imagined Langly was, well, a bit naive. He seemed that way even now, his arms wrapped around her in his sleep. Naive didn't seem like the right word for a grown man going to bed with a girl not even old enough to sign a lease.

They had fallen asleep on the couch, again. Her heartburn must have been bothering her. She had three pillows wedged tightly behind her back, keeping her in a sitting position as she slept. Langly was in the fetal position both on top of and beside her, and it looked uncomfortable. The couch clearly hadn't been designed for two six foot tall people.

Byers became uncomfortably aware that, in his sleep, Langly was nuzzling Thea's nipple through her t-shirt.

John Byers replaced the quilt they had kicked off, poured the cereal he had come for, and returned to his bed.

~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~

End 03