He catches her by surprise, on New Year's Eve. Her heart has no time to prepare itself, no time to properly flutter in anticipation. Which is probably a good thing, because she also has no time to flee.
She's always imagined their first kiss being somehow bigger-than-life, full of Importance and Weight and Meaning. Yet here, in this hospital, it's instead light-as-a-feather, so soft and quiet, she almost misses it.
She almost misses it, but then she's in it, closing her eyes at the sinking pull of his lips against her own. It's mesmerizing and amazing and surely lasts for at least an hour, or that's how it feels, as memories of the last six years rush through her mind like a freight train.
But it's over almost as quickly as it began, and she wonders immediately whether it actually even happened at all. He tells her the world didn't end, and though she verbally agrees, her mind is still lost in that kiss that happened-before-she-realized-it-was-happening and was-over-before-she-realized-it-had-begun.
As they walk out the door, she's already forgetting the feel of it. Her tongue sweeps out and searches, desperate for evidence he was actually there. Shouldn't she be able to taste him? Shouldn't there be a lingering impression of that bottom lip still left upon her own?
She held a butterfly cupped in her hands once, felt its wings whisper against her palms. Bill said she was lying, and when she cracked open her fingers as proof, it flew away before she had time to close them. Her heart aches the very same way it did back then.
They stop at her car, and she looks at her feet. They're small and in heels, and attached to a woman who just kissed Fox Mulder for the very first time. She wants to do it again. She wants to do it again and remember it, then do it some more and remember those times, too.
"Mulder," she murmurs, on New Year's Day, outside a hospital in which the world didn't end, "Mulder…, I wonder if next time…, maybe next time, could you give me some warning…?"
She's still looking at her feet, and between them appear two more, larger and black, and attached to the man who kissed her in a hallway just moments ago.
His hand cups her chin and lifts as he says, "Is this enough warning?" and it's really not, but he's already there, lips against hers like they belong there.
Her hands find his neck and she tightens her grip—she locks them around the back like a vice. And as she meets his tongue for the very first time, she thinks, "I'm keeping this butterfly forever."