Stella slipped through the crowd and made her way towards the cherry wood bar. As she approached, a space opened up and she quickly sidled between two suits and leaning against the bar top. It felt good to be back in DC, surrounded by nameless, faceless people, their voices melting around her into a background pulse of thrumming white noise.
The type of beautiful, quiet chaos.
It calmed her.
She caught the bartender's eye and raised her index finger, indicating that she was ready to be served. He finished two martinis and placed them in front of two over-eager and blatantly underage customers before making his way over towards her.
"What will you have?" He asked, wiping the bar down.
Stella pursed her lips, fingers gently tapping against the wood. "Old Fashioned."
When he returned with her drink, she murmured a non-committal thank you before making her way towards the lounge area, spotting one of the empty booths, Stella made a beeline for it. Once seated on the dark leather, she swirled the amber liquid with the small clear straw; the citrus rind floated obtrusively in the small proximity of it's crystal prison.
For a long while Stella sat in the booth in silence, mulling over stringent facts and possible motives pertaining to the case she was currently working on. She knew that she shouldn't attempt to psychoanalyse anything at the moment when her mind kept dipping into the recesses of the past. She could feel it, gnawing on the edge of her subconscious, a heavy cloud of past cases threatening to dig it's icy cold fingers around her throat and submerge her in the horrors of the past, the air in her lungs turning to ice.
Instead, she cleared her throat and shook her head not allowing carefully bottled up emotions to get the better of her.
When Stella ordered her second drink she asked the waitress to keep them coming. She took a sip of the icy cold water that she'd set off to the side, on a mostly empty stomach she needed something to dilute and disperse the heavy liquor filling her stomach.
Stella looked up as a tumbler of whiskey was set in front of her, dark eyes met blue, the woman motioned to the empty side opposite her, she nodded once, giving her permission to join her.
"How was London?"
Long fingers played with the long stem of her martini glass, those same dexterous fingers that could slice open and stitch together with exquisite precision, Stella could watch those fingers work all day.
"Wet." The blonde tilted her chin, surveying the younger woman.
The woman huffed a quiet laugh, russet strands crinkling against the collar of her blouse as she leaned forward, tucking a highlighted curl behind her ear. Stella's cool blue eyes traced the bridge of her nose, down to the wide stretch of her mouth, the point of her chin sharp from the light fixture behind her.
"Yes, it is." She agreed, a wry smile flickered across ruby lips.
Stella took a quick sip of the honey coloured liquid, closing her eyes and humming in contentment at the slight burn, the liquid sliding down her throat like velvet.
The blonde focused her attention on her tumbler, trying to decide figure out the best way to articulate a question, in order to get an honest answer from the woman sitting across from her. Brow furrowed, Stella already knew that asking her upfront was the best way to get the answer from her.
"Did McNaughton ask you to check up on me, Scully?"
Stella's posture remained unaffected, relaxed, yet inside she was an exposed nerve ending. She watched the woman closely, looking for any indication that she was wavering. The redhead continued as though she hadn't heard Stella's words, reaching forward with nimble fingers to retrieve the pick from the glass, an olive sliding past red lips, leaving behind a lipstick stain in it's place.
"Stella—"
"Dana."
Scully held the pick in between two fingers, concerned eyes not wavering from icy cold blue. She acquiesced, settling the pick on a serviette to her left.
"I wanted to see how you've been...handing things." She carefully chose her words.
But she didn't answer the question.
Stella gnawed on her bottom lip, a fruitless attempt to stop the onslaught of hidden fears and worries that threatened to spit boiling water and scalding steam from her mouth . Scully could still see it hidden in the dark of her irises.
"McNaughton asked you to check up on me."
It wasn't a question this time.
Scully let out a quiet sigh, her fingers returning to play with the stem of the glass.
The next few hours passed quickly and it was getting late, Stella was finishing up her fourth drink— a few glasses of water in between were keeping her steady, although she was now starting to feel a little tipsy. Scully nursed her third to her chest, now sitting next to Stella on her side of the booth.
Stella had successfully side-stepped that tasteless conversation topic, not wanting to pick at the scab and expose anyone to that wound, the two women were now simply just enjoying their drinks in a comfortable silence.
"Have you ever been to a trivia night?"
The question hung in the air.
It was as though she had plucked the topic from a 'ways to get to know your associate in 25 questions or less'. It hovered in the space between them.
Crossing her left leg across her right, Stella's calf brushed against the younger woman's leg. Glancing up underneath heavy lashes, she followed Scully's eye-line and it landed on: a cheap bordering on trashy-looking banner which was being hung up by the staff.
The corner of Stella's lips flicked upwards in a small smirk. Surely she wasn't going to challenge her to a game of trivia?
Now on every Monday!
Stella tucked that little nugget of information away for another time.
A murmur of quiet words beside her caused the blonde to focus her attention back on her present company.
"—of what game?"
Scully cast a sidelong glance at Stella, a small smile tugging at her lips in triumph when she made no move to answer the question, having only heard half of it. She continued, eyes wide in amusement, reading off of a heavily crumpled pamphlet that must of been set down some time during the night, probably when their drinks were being topped up.
Stella reached out and smoothed her thumb and index finger across the black and white paper, attempting to smooth out the creases so that she could read the small letters. She shifted closer towards the redhead to get a closer look at the random questions listed, this time her calf made more of firm impact against the other woman's leg
"Oh," Scully breathed, "This is a good one. What is the name for a protein that acts as a biological catalyst?"
The blonde pressed closer to the redhead, who was still completely enraptured by the words in front of her, unaware of the warmth pressed against her side, so that when the word spilled across the bare skin of her neck, "Enzyme," against that one sensitive spot, Scully felt a flush begin to spread across her chest.
Her breathing suddenly became very shallow, her lungs were not filling properly with each intake of breath. A function it's been happy to do consistently up until this moment. Traitor, she thought, her own body making it blatantly obvious that she was very much affected by one Stella Gibson.
"How many planets in our solar system have moons?"
Her head was spinning, she knew this but every time she listed the planets in her head she caught a waft of Stella's perfume and her brain short-circuited. She swallowed hard.
"There's— uh, Jupiter..of course and-" Scully let out a huff, wondering when logic suddenly decided to leave her side.
"Of course." Stella murmured.
"And Venus doesn't...doesn't have a moon. So you- uh, you can take that out of the equation."
Scully was starting to get her bearings, a pleased small smile cornering it's way over her mouth.
And then a slim digit started to circle her knee, light touches tracing, dipping, sliding underneath the material that rested above her knee, flirting with the fabric. Stella wanted to trace and map every line, contour and sharp edge of her body, she wanted to leave finger marks on her hips and lipstick stains in-between her thighs.
Scully attempted to repress the shiver that rolled down her spine as Stella's fingers paused just underneath the crease of her skirt, the redhead pointed her shoulders back to straighten her spine and feign nonchalance.
She wasn't affected.
She wasn't.
She wasn't imagining pressing her body down and against a bare thigh - warm and wet and throbbing. Scully squeezed her thighs together, accidentally - and effectively trapping the tips of Stella's fingers between her limbs.
She knew one thing for sure. She sure as hell wasn't going to let the blonde beat her.
The game was on.