TITLE: Forbidden Fruit
AUTHOR: Kristen K2
EMAIL: k2_fanfic@yahoo.com
WEBSITE: http://www.iyam-fic.com/k2/forbiddenfruit.htm
SUMMARY: Grapes are the perfect fruit. What happens when 
they go out of season? 
KEYWORDS: Skinner, Kim, UST
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: none
DISCLAIMER: The characters herein belong to 1013.
ARCHIVE: Anywhere, just ask first.
NOTES: For Rev. Anna for the HaremXF Secret Valentine 
Challenge. She asked for a romantic Skinner, and I hope I 
delivered. Heartfelt thanks to Spica, Muridae and G-EMS for 
the beta and the original inspiration for the story.

+++++

He enjoys watching her eat grapes at her desk. It's a 
secret pleasure he's allowed himself over the years; in his 
most lighthearted moments, it amuses him to think of it as 
"forbidden fruit". She shouldn't be eating at her desk, and 
he shouldn't be spying on her. But neither one can seem to 
break the habit, and after a while it feels like it's a 
mutual vice.

The first time, there is a measure of guilty concern 
involved; is he working her so hard she doesn't have time 
for a full lunch break? Is she unable to keep up with the 
unrelenting pace of his office? Has he brought her up from 
the general clerical pool too soon for her skill level? He 
debates approaching her with his worries, or lessening her 
workload in the late mornings, but neither move seems 
practical. 

Soon after, he realizes his concerns are, well, fruitless; 
eating her afternoon bag of grapes is a perfect reflection 
of her abilities. From the angle of their desks, he can't 
see her face, but he can hear her. As she grabs another 
grape, the sound of her fingers on the keyboard ceases only 
for the briefest of moments, then resumes its rhythmic 
pace. Clack, clack, pause, clack, clack, clack. It takes 
him longer to find the shift key. 

He can't see her, but he can see the fruit. Pre-stripped 
from their stems, the fresh green grapes lay flat in a 
clear bag, the opening just wide enough to fit her small 
hand. It darts in and out too fast for him to actually see 
her take the fruit out, but he knows she's eating them just 
the same. As the afternoon progresses, as calls come in and 
meetings are scheduled and reports are typed, the bag of 
fruit empties steadily. When she surreptitiously slips the 
bag into her top drawer, he rightly takes it as a signal 
that someone is heading for her office door. By three 
o'clock sharp, her desk is clean once again, and the only 
evidence that anything not work-related was ever there is a 
faint lingering sweetness on her breath. 

The efficiency of her system charms him. Everything about 
her afternoon snack -- from the rapid-fire way she eats the 
grapes, to the assumed preparation involved in stripping 
and bagging them at home, even to her choice of fruit -- 
echoes the qualities he appreciates most about her. Grapes 
are a simple fruit, uncomplicated and tidy and reliable. 
Their small rounded shape doesn't necessitate messy 
cleanup, and they don't require a lot of attention or 
effort to enjoy their full flavor. He's not a man given to 
the abstraction of metaphor, but even he can't ignore how 
aptly her illicit snack describes her.

He feels foolish for his original doubts about her 
competence. If she wonders about the over-abundance of 
praise in her performance review the following month, she 
says nothing. She only smiles and thanks him, her eyes 
bright with a piercing honesty as she tells him working for 
him is one of the great pleasures in her life.

It's only years later that he realizes her comment 
disheartened him.

+++++

That feeling of disappointment festers unexamined until the 
day she switches fruit. He notes the change in the color 
inside the clear bag, but it doesn't register at first; he 
assumes the grocery store only had red grapes available 
this week. Then the sharp sweet smell of raspberries wafts 
from her space to his, and a surprising flash of anger 
rushes through him.

The anger continues to swell as he watches and hears her, 
her neat and organized system unchanged by the switch in 
fruit. Clack, clack, pause, clack, clack, clack. 

The discordant noise grates on him all afternoon, 
disrupting his thought processes even when the door is 
closed between them. The oblivious agent sitting in front 
of his desk drones on about the successful results of his 
case, all of which are documented in the file on Skinner's 
desk. A file handed to him by Kim just as the meeting 
began; under the pretense of the debriefing, he skims 
through the pages looking for a telltale red stain. There's 
nothing there but clean white edges, but the absence only 
serves to fuel his irrational anger hotter. 

Raspberries should be savored, not eaten furtively under 
fluorescent lights, not nibbled at while printers spew out 
copies of memos. They're meant to be eaten slowly, in a 
cool ceramic bowl brimming over with heavy white cream on 
rainy Sunday mornings. In a silver spoon aglow under 
flickering candlelight, the brittle crack of the crisp 
layer of the creme brulee softened by her laughing voice. 
In the wild, the heady rays of the sun burnishing coppery 
hair and bald scalps, the tiny thorns nipping at his 
fingertips as he pulls a berry off the bush and raises it 
to her stained lips, his own mouth following the path of 
his fingers and tasting the sweet fruit against her tongue.  

At the unbidden images, Skinner sits forward with a start, 
but he manages to brush off the agent's concerned look with 
a wave of his hand. He focuses all of his attention on the 
details of the remainder of the meeting, not giving the 
unfading thought of kissing her any consideration until he 
asks the other man to close the door behind him as he 
leaves.  

Forbidden fruit. Once alone, the irony weighs heavy in his 
chest; as his admin and closest subordinate, she's as 
forbidden to him as the apple was to Adam. The reasons are 
myriad, and he barely needs to remind himself of their 
existence. He knows them all instinctively, as if they've 
hovered in the back of his mind for years. 

Maybe they have, he concedes with a sigh. Not that the 
timing matters; he's no more likely to act on his desires 
now than he was then. Too much is at stake, and he can't 
put his position -- or hers -- at risk like that. His anger 
fades into resignation as he banishes the thought of 
kissing her back into the furthest corner of his mind, 
where it should have stayed from the beginning. 

Still, it's difficult to resist the temptation of being 
near her, and when the opportunity of handing her a file 
arises, he takes it. She doesn't notice him approaching 
right away, and he stops in the doorway, transfixed by the 
naked expression on her face. A damp lock of her hair 
strays across her forehead in the unremitting afternoon 
sunlight, and her eyes are half-shut, unfocused in 
pleasure. A quiet, womanly smile curves one corner of her 
unstained lips, and it strikes him hard that she would look 
just like that as she came. Before he can push the thought 
away, she turns her face toward him, her startled gaze 
immediately connecting with his embarrassed one, and her 
smile expands to engulf them both in a shared secret.

In that brief instant, he realizes the desire for forbidden 
fruit has been mutual all along.
  
END