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lacedcompulsion · 4 days ago

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blood bank

CHAPTER ONE

pairing: spencer reid x reader (bau!reader)

content warnings & tags: 18+, wc 4k+, reader's dad was a serial killer, cm canon violence (cases), reader's abigail hobbs esque kinda, and a bit like rust cohle, allusion to throwing up but not explicit, sexual tension, eventual smut, slowburn, leans into southern gothic

notes: new series!!! i was rewatching season 6 like damn they did ashley so wrong imagine having that cool of a backstory and then they totally waste it and only play into it for one singular episode before forgetting it exists so anyway this story is the result of me fully fleshing out that kind of storyline except its on reader ok yay lmk what u think

You sit with your legs curled beneath you in the passenger seat of an FBI car. The vinyl is cracked and hot against your skin and sticking like some kind of wound that leans low with the weight of it all. Your head rests against the glass, which trembles faintly from the engine. The road’s long, like a slow whisper, the way a road will whisper when it knows what you’ve done, what you’ve seen, what you’ve left back there on the porch with the flies and the blood and the sudden stillness of a world gutted and restuffed.

Hotch is driving. He hasn’t spoken in half an hour, maybe longer. The radio is off — not unusual after an arrest is made — and the windows are cracked just enough to let in the buzzing heat of rural Georgia and the scent of manure and dust and honeysuckle gone a little sickly in the wet summer air.

You press the side of your cheek into the glass, smushed up just enough to see the headlights of the car Morgan’s driving behind you. There’s a girl — a victim — curled up in his backseat.

There is a stone somewhere deep in your stomach, heavy, like a truth you swallowed and forgot to chew. The road goes on, slow as syrup, old as dirt, older than language maybe, curling back through hollows and under low bridges where the light turns green and shadowed and strange.

You think, not for the first time, that the world here isn’t alive so much as it is waiting for someone to notice it breathing.

—

Three weeks and the coffee still tastes burnt and the light still bleeds in tired through the slats of the blinds like it’s too old to bother being bright.

You’re sitting in your chair, the same chair that creaks a little when you lean, the one with the one broken wheel that makes you slant slightly left like a ship leaning into the wind. There’s a file on your desk but it’s nothing urgent, just background, and you’re half-listening to Spencer explain something about scent memory and synapses while JJ laughs softly into her mug. You wonder, distantly, if they’re flirting.

The smell of Emily’s leftover cinnamon oatmeal and the leftover buzz of sleep waft in from her desk. JJ raises an eyebrow, which is all it takes to make the brunette stand and take it over to the trash can, bickering on her way over. You wonder, more clearly, if they’re flirting.

Georgia is on your mind more than the average case is. You usually throw away what you can’t keep — the headache from the precinct lights, the rusty faucet in the aging witness’ house, the tangy perfume of the crying mother — and keep what clings to you and refuses to be thrown away — the instrument the second victim played in school band, the early stage alcoholism of the grieving older brother. You hope whatever it was that followed you out of those woods will lose interest or direction or both.

The presence of Garcia humming something about Motown is warm on your shoulder. Morgan’s teasing her.

Then the phone rings. Not your phone but the phone — the one in Hotch’s office that’s loud enough to hear from your desk when he leaves his door more than 4 inches ajar, the one that only rings when something is broken somewhere else.

Your spine straightens before your mind catches up. Hotch picks up. Just says Hotchner and then listens.

“Conference room,” he says as he walks farther away from his office. He has that even tone that means this is already bad and we’re already too late.

You’re moving before your body quite agrees, wheels squeaking, footsteps soft against tile that still smells faintly of age despite renovation.

Down the hall the noise fades — the laughter from desk agents who only stare at the photos but think they have it rough — and then it’s just the sound of the team moving together, boots and heels and sneakers, Spencer clutching his file like it’s a lifeline, Morgan already cracking his knuckles.

At the table, JJ’s already standing, remote in hand, eyes shadowed with whatever she’s about to show you. A file sits open in front of each chair. Photos, typed notes, a map that’s more red pins than towns.

“Morning,” she says. But her voice skips the word like it’s not worth grounding in time. She clicks the remote and the screen behind her lights up.

Your mind moves faster than you can register. You think in fragments.

A photo. Then another. Both girls. Young. Maybe thirteen, maybe less. Hair tangled. Dirt on cheeks.

“Two missing girls. Taken two days apart in adjacent counties along the Tennessee-Alabama border. Low population, rural. No surveillance, no viable witnesses. Both disappeared within a quarter mile of their homes.”

“Bodies?” Morgan asks, voice low.

JJ shakes her head. “Not yet. But yesterday, a farmer found this.” She clicks again. A shoe. Just one. Mud-caked, canvas, pink stripe down the side.

“Size four,” JJ adds. “Matches the younger girl, Alyssa Coleman. Age eleven. Went missing walking home from a youth church event. Broad daylight.”

“So he just grabbed her?” Morgan asks, a bit rhetorical, flipping through the file.

“Looks that way. No signs of forced entry. No ransom.”

Hotch finally sits. “Two girls, close proximity, short time frame. Escalation pattern.” He’s muttering more than he is speaking, which is how he always speaks when things are sad.

Spencer lifts his head. “Or practice. The first might’ve been unintentional. A test.”

“Predator’s learning curve,” you say. You don’t mean to. But it comes out anyway.

They all look toward you for half a second. Just enough that your tongue curls in your mouth, born out of half-formed regret at something you’re not sure was a wrongdoing.

JJ nods. “Local PD’s out of depth. They don’t have anyone trained for this kind of case.”

Garcia, already tapping at her laptop from her usual perch in the corner, says, “And I’m already pulling utility access, county records, parolees within a twenty-mile radius, and any similar cases going back… ten years? Okay, fifteen. Give me twenty minutes and a strong espresso and I’ll find his digital footprint. Or his diary.”

Hotch turns to the rest of you. “Wheels up in forty-five.”

You can feel it again, thick in the lungs. The descent.

If he’s taken two, he’ll take another.

—

The SUVs are waiting when you land. The local deputy — a lean man with a weak handshake — is there at the gate, which is highly unusual. You keep him in your periphery until Hotch assigns you a car. The deputy calls you ma’am when he helps load your bags and won’t meet Hotch’s eyes when he talks about the second abduction, like maybe the shame of not stopping it clings to his uniform.

You sit in the back. Not because you want to, not really. Just because Spencer climbs into the seat beside you like it’s nothing, like he doesn’t notice, like it’s coincidence or habit or whatever it is you’ve both been doing for the past few months, especially since the last case, since the quiet car ride back from that porch no one mentions. And why would they?

His knee rests close to yours. You’re not touching, but he’s close enough that you can feel the warmth of him, his stillness, the radial static of his brain working on ten problems at once. Outside, the fields stretch low and flat. Scrub grass and cattle fencing and mailboxes that lean like they’re tired of getting bad news.

“We’re dealing with familiarity,” Spencer says, half to himself. “The second girl was taken in under sixty seconds. That’s not chance. That’s comfort with the geography. With the pattern.”

You nod, say nothing.

He glances at you. Just once, too short to be seen if you weren’t looking for, but you feel it. It’s a quiet check-in. That small question he won’t speak. You okay?

You blink slowly. Look out the window. “He’s hunting in daylight,” you murmur. “He wants to be seen. Or he’s not afraid to be.”

“Which means he knows the land better than we do.” Reid exhales, the smallest sound. “Most of them do.”

The SUV turns down a gravel road before stopping in the parking lot. Reid opens the door first. Steps out and looks back at you.

“Come on,” he says, but it’s not really a command.

Your boots are in the dirt, the heat’s licking the back of your neck, and Spencer is beside you tracking something unseen in the air. The cicadas won’t stop screaming and when you walk into the precinct it feels less like walking and more like being led.

Hotch catches up with the deputy and then tells you and Spencer to go to the crime scene. Spencer’s mouth contorts in a barely visible way you’ve picked up on when he gets sent to the scene. He’s less comfortable when he has to see the way the victims lived the last moments of their lives.

The fields pass like old film on the way there — grainy, repetitive. In the passenger seat Spencer flips through photos in his file, barely blinking, as if he doesn’t already have them memorized. His notebook is open, balanced on one knee, and there’s a blur of words in narrow handwriting no one but him can fully decode. You glance over without taking your eyes off the road for too long.

Reid glances up. “What do you think it is about?

“Presence,” you say, and watch a silo fall behind the horizon.

He tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. “You mean he's theatrical?”

You shake your head. “Not, like, showy. Intentional. Like when you meet a preacher who believes every word he says. Doesn't raise his voice because he doesn’t need to.”

His voice comes quiet. “I knew someone like that once. Still dream about him sometimes.”

You don’t ask who. You know better.

—

The following night you and Spencer meet up with Morgan at a roadside diner off Route 12. It’s the kind with crooked booths and windows stained soft by decades of fried food and loss. The waitress calls everyone hon and the coffee tastes a faint amount like gasoline.

Morgan’s humming low over a map — not that he knows it. He sings psychedelic rock when he’s thinking. You’re across from Spencer in a booth by the window, drinking black coffee. You're thirsty for it but it gives your hands something to do. You notice he hasn’t touched his food. Instead, he's sketching something in the margin of his notes, like a spiral, or maybe an insect, or maybe it’s nothing at all.

“You draw when you’re thinking,” you say. Morgan excuses himself for more coffee. You watch him wander over to the counter and flirt with one of the waitresses. Everyone has a vice, you think.

Spencer doesn’t look up, but his shoulders slack and you wonder why he feels more at ease with you than he does with Morgan. Maybe it’s because you don’t have to ask for confirmation to understand him. “I draw when I’m stuck.”

“You think we’re stuck?”

He taps the pen against the edge of the table. “I think we’re circling.”

You lean back. The faux leather creaks under your spine.

“You know circles are the most ancient form of worship,” you murmur. “Everything we don’t understand, we trace in rings.”

Spencer’s expression is unreadable but not unfeeling. “Is that what you do?”

You don’t answer. Morgan laughs once, short and sharp, at something the waitress said.

Then he asks, without irony: “Do you think the girls are still alive?”

You finish your coffee. Bitter to the end.

“I think he keeps them as long as they keep believing in him. And when the faith dies, so do they.”

He closes his notebook. His pen has almost run out of ink.

A truck passes by outside, stopping in the parking lot long enough for you to be able to stare at the man in the driver’s seat and the girl beside him. Her bare feet are on the dash and a cigarette hangs like a question from her mouth. She only looks straight out of the window like she’s tracking some invisible thing crawling across the horizon that none of the rest of you can see.

“I think they’re still alive,” you clarify.

“You said,” he starts slowly, “that when the faith dies, so do they.”

You nod once. Stir an empty spoon in the second cup of coffee you just poured that you still don’t want just to keep your hands moving. “Yeah. But kids believe in things long after they’ve stopped making sense. They believe in miracles. And monsters. And people, even when they shouldn’t.”

And now he’s listening in that way only Spencer Reid listens. You feel exposed. You keep talking anyway.

“This guy’s smart. Careful. But he’s not done. He’s not finished building whatever world he’s making in there, wherever he’s keeping them. That means they’re still useful. Still alive. And if he’s anything like I think he is, he doesn’t want them dead. Not yet. He wants them transformed.”

You watch him let that settle. He closes his notebook and pushes it to the side.

“You ever think you might be too close to a case?” he asks softly.

You let out something half a laugh. “Define close.”

“I mean… do you ever see something familiar in them?”

You don’t answer for a long while. Not because you don’t know. Because you do.

“There’s a difference,” you say finally, “between relating to something and recognizing it. One is personal. The other’s... chemical. Like scent. Like déjà vu. You just know when you’ve smelled rot before.”

Spencer looks down. “Still,” he says, “I think you’re empathizing with the victims.”

You shift. Elbow on the table now. Staring out the window. Dust trails from some old Chevy pickup rolling past. Pasture land beyond, split by barbed wire and scrub grass. You can see the hills in the distance, darkening under twilight. Somewhere in those breaks of land, he’s waiting.

“People around here,” you say, more to yourself than anyone, “they grow up knowing the land will take you. I think he sees himself as ordained. Blood and obedience and silence. And he’s convinced himself it’s holy.”

There’s a beat. Then another. “Remember Tobias?”

Of course. How could you forget? “Yeah.”

“Gideon tried to talk to me through the camera, through his computer system,” he says. “He told me he was perverting God to justify murder.” You’re not really sure what to say to that. People pervert God to justify everything.

Spencer flips his notebook to an empty page. “If that’s true, what you said, if this is a belief system, then we can map it. Use the pattern against him.”

You nod. “Exactly. Ritual.”

“You scare me a little when you talk like this,” Spencer says. He pauses, chews on his lower lip like there’s not a full plate of food in front of him. “We’re gonna find them.”

“No,” you murmur. “We already are.”

—

Sometimes it’s a little easy. Too easy it leaves you looking over your shoulder, waiting for the guy to pop up again.

Garcia gets a hit on an older murder after you and Spencer give her updated parameters — it was twenty years back, because the unsubstantiated was young when he first started killing, you realized— and tracks down the original suspect. He fits the profile.

The cabin’s quiet the way only early morning makes it. Spencer is pretending to read. The file’s open in his lap but he hasn’t turned a page in twenty minutes. Outside the window it’s just black sky and nothing underneath.

“They were lucky,” he says finally, not looking up. Voice low like it’s meant to be said into the air, not to you.

“If you call duct tape and locked basements luck.”

He closes the file and sets it down. “They’re alive.”

“They’re changed,” you say. “That doesn’t always feel like the same thing.”

There’s something unreadable behind his eyes. Not judgment. Not pity either.

“You said the ones who survive still believe,” he says. “Do you think they still do?”

“I think belief’s a thing you carry even after it dies. Like a body you forget to bury.”

He watches you for a while. “You’re not talking about them.” Spencer shifts in his seat. Picks up the file again. Doesn’t open it. “I don’t know if you’re trying to outrun something,” he says, “or if you’ve already stopped.”

You look out the window. It’s still just black.

—

The light’s coming in low through the wide front windows, hazy with dust, turning every cracked spine gold. You’re walking slowly, one hand trailing the shelves like you’re expecting a title to speak first.

Spencer’s already holding three books he has no intention of putting down. You’re empty-handed on principle.

“She was melodramatic,” you say.

“She was precise,” Spencer counters.

You glance at him, half-smirking. “Right. But does that make it tolerable? Or just clinical?”

“She wasn’t writing for comfort.”

“No,” you say. “She was writing for someone to notice. There’s a difference.”

Spencer looks at you over the rim of his glasses. You’ve been debating the quality of Sylvia Plath’s writing for seven and a half minutes. You were ready to be done with it after minute two, but he kept going, and you think he might like to be challenged, so you keep going, too.

“You’re mistaking vulnerability for performance,” he says.

“People bleed in poems all the time. Doesn’t mean it’s not self-centered.”

“That’s a little cold.”

You shrug. “Doesn’t make it wrong.” You keep walking. He follows, even though the section he said he wanted to stop by is long behind him.

Near the back, the air gets warmer. There isn’t any music playing, so the only background noise you have is the soft drag of another browser flipping pages somewhere near the autobiography wall. You pull a paperback from the shelf and thumb through it absently.

You glance over your shoulder every so often. You’re worried you’ll see a member of your team while you’re out here. With Spencer. Outside with Spencer. The two of you are friends, of course, but sometimes your hang-outs feel slightly more intimate than allowed for coworkers. You don’t feel like dealing with the headache.

“She was twenty when she wrote some of it,” he says. “Do you ever think about what it means to make something lasting before you know who you are?”

You close the book without reading a line and tuck it under your arm. You know he hates to stand out. “That’s what makes it hard to forgive.”

Spencer shifts the books under his arm. “So who gets to write about suffering?”

“I didn’t say she shouldn’t write. I just said I don’t have to like the sound of it.”

You drift into the used travel section. Books with cracked bindings and outdated maps. He brushes past you to get to a shelf, a little too close to be casual, but not quite bold enough to mean something else.

You feel it anyway. The almost.

He finds a small, dog-eared volume of translated haiku. Holds it out.

“This seems more your speed.”

You flip it open. Read one silently. Read another.

Then you hand it back, trying not to smile. “Still too many words.”

He laughs, real, and doesn’t offer it again.

You stop near the front. A battered copy of Ariel sits on display. You tap the cover once and raise an eyebrow at him.

“She could write,” you say. “I just didn’t want to be inside her head that long.”

Spencer’s standing beside you now, watching your hand on the book.

“Some of us never leave ours,” he says.

You glance at him. His eyes don’t move.

—

The next case makes your stomach turn like one of those cement mixing trucks you see every couple of years traveling far too fast for its size on the highway.

You don't speak to Spencer outside of genuine work.

When you're called out to the crime scene, you duck behind a tree and empty the contents of your stomach behind a tree.

Emily gives you a look when you reappear but doesn't say anything. She never does.

Her bangs have been cut shorter, and you think the change may have come from her own hands overnight. You keep your lips pressed close when she detaches a section from the sweat of her forehead.

Reciprocity is your word of the day.

—

Late June settles over Virginia with high humidity and pretty sunrises. Summer has crawled back into Virginia, stubborn and green. Inside Quantico, the fluorescent lights keep everything back at a neutral.

Your morning breaks open with a click of JJ’s heels on linoleum and the sharp hiss of Hotch’s office door swinging closed. You’ve been at your desk for an hour, staring at case notes from last week. A short one that one was, too.

Spencer walks in late, for him. Tie a little crooked. Jacket over his shoulder, not on. His hair’s longer than it should be, maybe by accident. You glance up, and he glances back, but neither of you says anything.

“Morning,” he says, eventually.

“Is it?” you ask.

That earns you the ghost of a smile. He drops into his chair with a slow exhale and opens a manila folder.

Morgan strolls by with a protein bar and a teasing jab about Spencer’s book hangover. Spencer mutters something half-hearted, and Morgan leaves him alone.

Emily’s reading a cold case out loud to herself, pausing for her own commentary, which she doesn’t realize is out loud until JJ looks up from across the bullpen and says, “Do you want an audience or an exorcism?”

“Same thing, most days,” you say, and Emily laughs.

You should be working. You are. Sort of. The reports in front of you are half-written. The other half are somewhere in your head, still arranging themselves into narrative. You’re waiting for a thread to pull.

You meet Spencer by the coffee station and let him pour you a cup.

“That bookstore is closing,” Reid says suddenly, quiet enough that you’re the only one who hears.

You blink once, look over. “Which one?”

“The one with the broken ceiling fan. You said the haiku were too wordy.”

“That place’s been there forever.”

“Not anymore,” he says, quietly. “Went by last week. All the shelves were being emptied.”

You tap your pen against the table. “Funny how places vanish. Doesn’t feel like they should be allowed.”

“Places don’t vanish,” he says. “People stop returning to them.”

At your desk you glance down at your report again. The words are still scrambled. Across the bullpen, Garcia pops her head out of her office.

“We got something,” she says, voice bright but face not matching.

Reid falls into step beside you as you head for the stairs.

The conference room door opens.

You both step inside.

—

You don’t see Spencer outside of work for two weeks. It’s semi-unusual — you both try to at least grab coffee after a particularly long day.

(Spencer says people can be friends outside of work. You ponder what that undecipherable look is in his eyes.)

He shows up at your door with Chinese food and your eyes wrinkle. He looks hurt, but you watch it pass over as he realizes he’s a profiler; he can read you well enough to know that overlaying his insecurities on your actions isn’t your true meaning.

“I don’t like having people in my apartment,” you say, just in case he wasn’t going to get all the way there himself.

“I know. I won’t stay long.”

“It’s not that,” you say and you open the door and let him step inside.

“I know,” he says again, and sets the food on your counter. You have no stools, no where to sit, so the two of you lean against the counter and eat lukewarm noodles. He reaches in his bag midway through his meal and pulls out a small book, then places it inches from your paper plate. “I got this for you. From that bookstore.”

“You didn’t—”

“I wanted to. Wanted to buy one last thing before they close, anyway.”

You turn it over in your hands. “Well, thank you.”

He doesn’t say you’re welcome, but he does let you have the last egg roll.

He leaves promptly, like he promised, and makes a remark like you two need to spend the weekend finding a new bookstore. What rings in your ears regardless of what words he was saying is I miss you.

When you flip it open, you notice something scrawled on the dedication page that matches the handwriting of a specific doctor you know.

I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.

You tuck it in your nightstand drawer like a bible.

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lacedcompulsion · 5 days ago

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SLOW LIKE HONEY

pairing: spencer reid x reader

content tags & warnings: 18+, wc 7800+, smut, bau!reader, friends w benefits, situationship moment, smut ofc, yearning, angst, i think drinking but can't remember idk, small allusion to throwing up but not explicitly, death bc they work several cases but it's nothing more than what we see in the show pretty much, not rlly a case fic but it is an aspect of the story, idk what season this is around tbh

notes: hiii first post!! i had this up on ao3 originally w another pairing but reworked it for this yay ok i hope u enjoy and let me know what u think if u want i guess... no pressure... ok bye!

Spencer’s breath on your neck is hot and partly wet, a well-received pacification as you continue jerking lightly against his hips. He has one hand on your waist, rubbing soothing circles with the pad of his left thumb. The other rests on your throat, not gripping, just lingering. He uses the hand on your waist to tap lightly to remind you to roll over and off him.

When your head nuzzles into the pillow next to his own, you just stare. It’s a justified sight; you think briefly that the laws of unrequited love are probably older than the laws of marriage.

“You staying the night?” you ask, voice soft. You try to hide the longing within it, the disappointment should he say no. And he probably will say no — rule number one: no staying the night when avoidable.

Spencer’s nose scrunches, fingers reaching up to brush a few strands of hair from his face. His fingers twitch and you think, just for a moment, that he might reach out and brush your hair, too.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Yeah,” you agree, turning your gaze to the ceiling, sucking your bottom lip between previously gnashing teeth.

Rule number two: no kissing outside of sex. It’s fine when he’s inside of you, you guys established. Not when you’re laying in bed, sweaty and breathing hard and outside of the haze caused by a mutual chase for relief.

You anticipate the weight beside you lifting, the cold air rushing into the bed, the pit in your stomach stretching and widening until you think it might swallow her whole.

What comes in lieu is Spencer’s hand resting on your waist. You almost protest — what about our rules?

Instead, you slip your tongue back behind your teeth and watch the fan circle, circle.

Rule number three: no lying.

When you wake three hours later, Spencer is gone.

✶

There are four dead women in Texas — strangled, asphyxiated. You know it will be a long case; the marks adorning the women’s bodies and the lack of posing them speak to a textbook sadist. The bodies stuffed in the forest, that total destruction of evidence, indicate an intelligent one. You breathe in a sigh as you watch Spencer’s fingers flip through the pages of his tan file.

“Guess we’re heading to Texarkana,” Morgan says beside you.

Your stomach turns. This job never gets easier.

What does, though, are Spencer’s eyes on you. The softness rushes through you the same way it did when you first shook hands, but it’s grown more comfortable. Steadier.

The turbulence isn’t bad, but it’s enough to jolt Spencer’s coffee, sending a few drops onto the file spread across his lap. He curses softly — which still sounds wrong coming from him — blotting at the papers with a napkin. Across the aisle, you watch him out of the corner of your eye, a faint smirk tugging at your lips.

“Careful, Spence,” Morgan teases from the row behind, leaning forward. “We don’t need you short-circuiting before we even land.”

Spencer mutters something about the statistical improbability of turbulence causing major spills, but you try your hardest to tune it out. You shift your focus back to the folder in your hands and work yourself to think. To work. It’s what you’re here for. You’re not here for Spencer.

Still, his idle hands fidgeting with the dirty napkin tug at your very carefully placed focus. You think of the unsub, instead. He’s precise, methodical, angry. You can feel it in the patterns carved into the victims' skin, in the sheer rage of the injuries.

JJ’s voice cuts through the hum of the engines as she adjusts herself in the leather couch across from where you’re sitting. “Victimology suggests a personal vendetta. Both women have ties to the same gym, but nothing beyond that yet.”

“So we’re looking at someone in the orbit of their personal lives,” Rossi says, flipping through his own file.

“Or someone who thinks they are,” Hotch replies from his seat at the front, voice grim as always.

You lean back, head against the headrest. Your fingers tighten around the folder. It’s not the first time you’ve flown into a city chasing a ghost, and it won’t be the last.

You glance up. Spencer’s eyes meet yours for a fraction longer than necessary.

It’s not a comfort you allow yourself to acknowledge often, but here, in the warmth of the plane, it feels as inevitable as the sunrise. Something constant, even when you’re on your way to prevent something that’s already unraveling.

✶

Their rooms are right next to each other, and you watch Spencer disappear behind the door without sparing you a glance. Your feet itch to walk over, but it’s late, and everyone’s all tired, and nothing that bears any resemblance to normal feels moral when you have dead bodies on your hands. You tuck one leg beneath you and lay the contents of the file across your bed, organized in a way only you can tell.

Right before you turn out the light, you hear a knock breaking through the barrier of the wall behind you.

You smile, raise a knuckle to the space above your headboard, and knock back.

✶

The precinct is quiet now, save for the faint buzz of dated fluorescent lights and the occasional shuffle of an officer passing by. The case is closed. The unsub — calm, articulate and utterly devoid of remorse — is in custody. His confession was delivered with an eerie precision that still crawls under your skin.

You stand by the evidence board, absently peeling tape from the corners of a photo. The faces of the victims stare back at you, lives now reduced to a few lines of text and grainy images. You pick up an eraser before exhaling slowly, fingers stilling as you hear footsteps behind you.

Spencer appears at your side, a cup of coffee in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. He offers the latter without a word, eyes soft in a way that you've come to understand means he sees more than he lets on.

You accept the water, twisting the cap open but not drinking. You say nothing about how he remembers that you don’t drink coffee past mid-afternoon. “We don’t leave till morning. You should go back to the hotel. You’ve been running on fumes.”

Spencer tilts his head just enough that no one should notice — you shouldn’t notice — and a faint smile plays at his lips. “Funny. I was just about to say the same to you.”

“Right.” You gesture with a nod of your head toward the now-empty chairs around the conference table. “Feels strange, doesn’t it? The quiet, after everything.”

Spencer nods, gaze drifting to the board. “Yeah. It always does.” His voice at the edge of his sentence lifts up and you wait for him to continue. He licks his lips and it puts an idea in your head that shouldn’t be there. Still, it persists. “You don’t have to feel so guilty about the ones we didn’t save, I hope you know. There’s nothing you could have done differently.”

You want to deflect, to make some dry comment and move on, but his eyes hold you there.

“I’m fine,” you say eventually. It sounds hollow even to your own ears.

Spencer shifts on his feet and inches closer, just close enough that anyone abruptly walking in wouldn’t force you to jump away. “I will head back to the hotel,” he says finally. “But only if you come with me.”

Like a dog, you trail behind him, tossing the eraser back on the table and ignoring how it rolls backwards until it clatters with a quiet clap on the ground.

✶

“Missed this,” Spencer murmurs, hand lazily running up your leg. He’s kneeled before you, hands on each of your thighs, pushing, spreading.

“This?” you prod. He blows softly between your legs, and you can feel him waiting for you to react. You oblige, fluttering your eyelids, falling backward on the mattress until the sterile, off-white duvet catches you.

“You know what I mean,” he whispers, parting your legs further like a peace offering.

You’re not sure you do.

Still, you tilt your head back and use a white-knuckle grip to grab at his hair and convey the things you can’t bring yourself to say by way of word.

✶

“Have you noticed you use present tense when speaking about the victims?” you ask once they’ve finished.

He pauses, gaze locking with yours. “Sometimes I… I feel like if we speak as if they’re still ours, still here, we can convince ourselves it’s true. It makes this all a little easier.”

His voice is soft, almost breaking in speech, and his meaning hangs between the two of you, undeniable.

“I can’t stop thinking about the timeline,” you say. “There’s something off. If the suspect left the second location at 8:15, they wouldn’t have made it across town in time to—”

✶

You guys go without a case for a month, which should feel like a good thing. It is a good thing. The less bodies out there the better.

You’re nursing a scotch at the bar — you don’t even like scotch, you just felt the need for something strong — and ignore the burning in your lower stomach, the ache between your legs. You sit and sip until the leather stool breathes enough courage into you for you to get up and walk out.

It’s been a month without the feeling of him rolling into you, writhing beneath him, legs twisting, hips turning, only one name chosen to slip past your lips — all reasons why you don’t even make it to Spencer’s bedroom when you show up at his door unexpectedly.

“How’d you find your way here?” he asks, two fingers rubbing circles on your clit.

“The b-bar,” you say, hands clutching at his biceps. “Was there, but I left,” you add in a hazy rush.

“Good girl,” he says, then rewards you by slipping two fingers inside.

It takes him two more minutes before he’s pulling his belt off, slipping himself inside of you, and says: “I needed this.”

(You don’t get caught up on how he said this. You definitely don’t pretend he said you as you were coming.)

You clear his throat when you both finish, shifting away and pulling a blanket over yourself like you’re trying to make yourself smaller on the opposite end of the couch. You get like this some of the time. Distant. Afraid.

The space between him and you feels wide, even though you can still feel the phantom weight of Spencer against your skin; the wetness of his saliva still resides on your lower lip, sticky and welcome as honey.

“I should go,” you say finally, tight.

Spencer doesn’t look at you, doesn’t move. “If you want.”

You flinch, but recover quick enough to grab your clothes off the floor. The silence between you stretches, unbearably so. You press your palms into your thighs, digging your nails into your skin, grounding yourself against the ache clawing its way up your throat.

When you stand you smooth down your clothes with trembling hands.

“I…” you start, but the words die in your throat. You think you could write an empty book full of things unsaid.

When he finally looks up, his eyes meeting yours, raw and unguarded, neither of you speak. You wait for him to say your name, to place an open palm on the cushion next to his and ask you to stay. Instead, there’s an untraceable, undefinable look in his eyes that you can’t distinguish from indifference.

So you turn, footsteps deafening as you walk away. Spencer doesn’t call after you. He stays rooted as the door swings shut.

The scent of him clings to your clothes like decay settling over a room harboring a dead body.

✶

You guys get over it within four days, like you always do.

You’re both on top of the covers, shoes off but shields up, watching some nothing-show flicker across the TV screen like it has something to say. It doesn’t. Neither do you. Not at first.

Spencer’s got his fingers folded under his chin like he’s solving the world again. You wonder if you’re the problem this time.

“You always do that,” you say, voice low like a dare.

He doesn’t look at you. “Do what.”

“That thing. Where you think so loud I can hear the math happening.”

His mouth tilts, barely. “Sorry. Didn’t realize thinking was disruptive.”

“It is,” you shoot back. “When I’m trying not to.”

That gets his attention. His eyes flick over, sharp and unreadable in a way that makes you want to say something reckless.

“You could always leave,” he says, not unkindly, but with some kind of challenge stitched into it.

You shift onto your side, face to his, a breath apart now. “If I wanted to leave, I wouldn’t be stealing half your pillow.”

He doesn’t answer for a beat. Maybe two. Then: “You always do that.”

You raise a brow. “What.”

“Make it sound like we’re not one wrong breath from kissing.”

There's silence after that. But not the safe kind.

You smirk — because it’s easier than feeling things. “Guess we’re both good at pretending.”

He swallows. Says nothing. The space between you gets smaller in that strange, invisible way where bodies don’t move but everything else does.

On the TV, the fake people keep laughing. You wonder what it’d take to join them.

✶

You don’t have a TV in your room, so when the two of you finally catch your breath again, the room is filled with nothing but static silence. The kind that creeps in under the door and settles on your chest like it paid for the room.

You’re sitting up, knees drawn to your chest like armor, picking at the seam of your old blanket like it wronged you. Like if you unravel enough knots, you’ll find the part of yourself that didn’t start caring. Spencer’s still lying back, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling like it has answers you don’t. Like it ever did.

“You weren’t supposed to stay,” you say, tone razor-light. Like it’s nothing. Like it doesn’t matter. Like he doesn’t matter. Except it does, and he does, and the air between you feels like it’s holding its breath.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. “Didn’t realize you were keeping score.”

You snort. “I’m not. I’m keeping boundaries.”

Your voice is too steady. You hate that it’s too steady. It betrays nothing, and that’s the problem.

“Oh, right. The imaginary fence around your feelings.” He says it flat, like a fact, but there’s that flicker — barely a crack — in his voice, and it lands heavier than he thinks it does.

You turn, slow, eyes sharp. “Don't psychoanalyze me just because you're losing your grip on casual.”

His jaw tightens. You watch it happen. Watch him go from soft to steel in half a second. “You think this is me losing grip?” He’s not loud. That’s the thing. He never needs to be.

You don’t answer. You pull the blanket tighter, even though you’re not cold. Your hands won’t stop moving — tucking, smoothing, anything to keep from reaching for him.

“You said no spending the night,” you murmur. “You said that. You’re the one who made that rule, not me.”

You’re trying not to sound like a little kid pointing fingers, pointing out a broken rule, but it’s there, the crack in your throat. You feel it more than you hear it.

“I did. And then you fell asleep on my arm and I—” he exhales, bitter-soft, “—didn’t feel like being alone. Sue me.”

It’s the first time he’s sounded tired. Not work-tired. Not jet-lag-tired. Real-tired.

“You should’ve left.” It comes out too fast, too loud. You regret it instantly. You want to shove the words back in your mouth and stitch your lips shut. You want to rewind five seconds and say please stay instead.

He sits up now, finally, finally meeting your eyes. “Say what you mean.”

The silence that follows isn’t empty. It’s crowded. With everything you’ve left unsaid since the first night, the third night, the one where he kissed your wrist like it meant something.

You clench your jaw. Mean is dangerous. Mean is everything you’re trying not to be.

Once you start meaning things, it stops being safe.

“I mean,” you start, voice quieter now, threadbare, “that I can’t keep waking up next to you and pretending it’s not ruining me a little.”

You don’t look at him when you say it. You look at your hands. The blanket. The space between your knees. Anything but his face.

And there it is. Your little apocalypse, out loud.

Spencer blinks, slow. Like he’s trying to rewind it, parse it, file it under Things To Analyze Later. But he just nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Then I’ll go.”

The words fall like bricks. No heat. No argument. Just resignation, folded neatly like one of his pressed work shirts.

He stands, grabs his coat from the chair, movements stiff like they’re too careful. Like if he moves too fast, he’ll shatter. You don’t stop him.

But you don’t look away, either. You make yourself watch. Like penance.

The door clicks behind him like punctuation. Not a period. Not quite. Maybe a semicolon.

And you lie back, staring at the ceiling, waiting for it to explain how you got here.

It doesn’t.

✶

The chill of mid-November isn’t much to speak of in Tallahassee, but the air feels heavy nonetheless. It’s bone dry and still in the cramped precinct, but you’re used to this — the unrelenting silence that builds until it threatens to rupture. The walls are yellowed with age, the lights too bright for such a small space. It smells faintly of burnt coffee and paper left too long in damp drawers.

You stand at the center of it all, the evidence spread across the table in front of you, photographs and crime scene reports arranged with surgical precision. Hotch’s doing.

You’re deliberate in your movements, every action honed to keep your mind focused on the case rather than the ache lodged under your ribs.

“Two couples, three weeks,” Hotch begins, more a reiteration to himself than anything.“No apparent connection between the victims beyond the methodology. He’s escalating.”

“Look at the posing,” Spencer says, coming around from the other side of the table to slightly rearrange the photos. “It’s too deliberate. Too symmetrical. This isn’t just about killing. It’s like he’s… creating something. A tableau, maybe.”

Rossi shakes his head. “Could just be obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Order for order’s sake.” Spencer hums in distant deliberation as he sets up a geographical profile on the room’s opposing board.

You’re not so sure Rossi’s right, but seniority rules. You turn your attention back to the board, adding another photo to the cluster.

Across the room, Spencer hovers near the whiteboard, arms crossed. You’ve barely spoken since you all arrived. You feel the weight of him pulling at your attention despite yourself. You feel too aware of how fragile everything feels.

✶

“You’re avoiding me,” Spencer says.

“You’re not exactly making yourself easy to approach,” you say without looking up, voice flat.

Later that evening, Spencer finds you in one of the precinct’s side offices. The room is dimly lit, the blinds half-drawn, casting striped shadows across the desk where you sit, scrolling through files on your laptop. The screen’s glow makes your face look washed out, otherworldly. Like something pulled from a memory instead of a moment. You feel him hesitating in the doorway.

“You’re avoiding me,” Spencer says.

“You’re not exactly making yourself easy to approach,” you say without looking up, voice flat.

“I wasn’t trying to make it hard,” he says finally, stepping inside like the floor might give out. “I just didn’t want to make it worse.”

You click your pen twice, too fast, like the notes you’re absentmindedly writing matter more than what he’s saying. It doesn’t. But you need something to touch, something to do. “Well,” you mutter, “congrats on that front.”

His breath catches. Just a little. Enough to register.

He walks further in, careful steps over scuffed linoleum, until he’s standing across from you. Not close, not far. Neutral territory. “I didn’t mean to stay that night. Or the time before that. I mean — I meant to leave. I just…”

He trails off. Looks away. Picks at a hangnail like it might distract him from how vulnerable he sounds. “It didn’t feel like a rule anymore. It felt like a punishment.”

You stop scrolling. Not because of what he said — though that hits somewhere low and raw — but because you’re tired. Tired of parsing every glance, every touch, every maybe.

“Then maybe we shouldn’t have made rules at all,” you say. “Maybe we should’ve just let this thing crash and burn from the beginning instead of dragging it out like a slow-motion car wreck.”

Spencer leans against the edge of the desk. His hands hover near yours but don’t touch. Like he’s asking without asking.

“I don’t want it to crash,” he says. Quiet. Steady. “I just didn’t know how to keep it from doing that without breaking something else in the process.”

You finally look up. Meet his eyes. They’re soft and stormy and apologizing in ways his words haven’t gotten to yet.

“You hurt me,” you say. It’s not meant to be an accusation, nor a weapon. Just the truth.

“I know,” he says, and he means it. “I hurt myself, too.”

You blink. Slow. The words don’t fix anything, but they peel the edge off the tension.

“So what now?” you ask.

Spencer shrugs, but it’s the careful kind. The kind that doesn’t want to shake the fragile thing between you. “I stay. Or I go. Your call.”

You scan his face like you’re trying to read a foreign language you only half-remember. But the burn’s still there. Under your ribs. In your throat.

“I can’t keep doing this,” you say, softer now, but not gentler. “It’s always almost. Always something you almost say, or almost feel, or almost admit.”

He looks down at the floor like it might offer him a script. It doesn’t.

“I didn’t come here to fight,” he says.

“You didn’t come here to fix anything either.”

That one lands. You see it in the way his hands stiffen at his sides, in the way he doesn’t argue.

You glance back at your notes. Eyes unfocused.. “You should go,” you whisper.

He lingers like he might say something. Might reach out.

This time, he leaves without closing the door.

✶

Your feet carry you past your own room and straight to Spencer’s once you step into the hotel. It feels like second nature, the way your hand reaches for something you can’t have but can’t get enough of.

You guys don’t do this — fuck during cases. It’s always after. It has to be after, or else what are they doing? Trading in humanity for a fire that’s always sure to cease once the moment passes?

He doesn’t answer at the first knock, so you just knock harder. It’s a threat: open up or let everyone see me standing here at your door. Spencer chooses the former.

“May I help you?” Spencer says, and it’s a half-joke, but you hear the hesitancy. His eyes dart around the hallway like this is a trap.

“Actually, I was thinking I could help you.”

There’s a brief moment where a spark filters through his eyes. It’s gone just before you can decipher whether it’s real or not. In its replacement, the door cracks open not even an inch, maybe a centimeter.

You take it for what she wants it to be. You step in and kiss him hard, rough, like you want to bite him. You almost do. Spencer breathes back into you, hands still at your sides before coming up to pull you in closer.

He pushes your back against the door in what you take to be a feeble attempt at reclaiming power. Instead of letting him have it, you pull his sweatpants and boxers down in one go, kissing as you descend down his body.

“I’m sorry,” you say, then place a kiss above his navel. “I’m sorry.” Another below it. “I’m so sorry.”

Spencer sucks in a breath after the placement of the next.

✶

“Tell me you don’t want me,” Spencer whispers, so low you almost lose it in the sound of your meshed bodies. You’re on top of him, rolling your hips against his like you might die without this — without him.

“What?”

“Tell me you don’t want me,” he repeats, nails digging into your skin.

Your stomach turns. It feels brittle and hard as you roll the thought of it around your mouth. You distance yourself when you let the words escape you, so far out of your own body you barely notice Spencer coming beneath you.

✶

Spencer winds up being right about the story aspect of the case. The killer had dropped out of college years prior, ditching his creative writing major for a subordinate position in his dad’s construction company. The need for a creative outlet came out in a less than favorable way.

You pat his shoulder on the plane, tell him he did a good job. He squeezes your shoulder before choosing the seat across from you. You glance around. No one saw.

There’s a fluttering in your stomach you don’t want to call butterflies, so you think of them as dull, brown moths.

✶

December bleeds slowly as it reaches the end of the month, and Strauss approves a winter break of some sort. One week off, but they have to do a certain amount of file work while at home. Everyone takes what they can get.

Morgan speaks with pride about the trip he’s taking to New York City — of the liquor and the women. Emily raises an eyebrow and jokes that he’s just looking for trouble. Spencer, predictably, launches into a tangent about holiday traditions around the world, but no one interrupts him. You’ve noticed the others think it’s endearing when he rambles.

You’re quiet, but do your best to not seem unhappy. You sit beside Spencer in the round table room as the team winds down. Your elbows bump occasionally, but neither of you moves to shift away.

As goodbyes are exchanged, Spencer lingers. His steps are measured, slow, as they both head toward the exit. The cold air waits for them outside, visible through the frosted glass of the door. He hesitates, hand stilling on the strap of his bag.

“You’ve got plans?” she asks, breaking the quiet between them.

He shrugs.

“Come on, share,” you say, but you’re not sure why you’re prying. Not sure you want the answer.

“I’m going to Las Vegas,” he says, then swallows hard. “I’m visiting my mother.”

You make a noise akin to ah, nodding. It’s a good thing, truly. You’ve only met his mom once but instantly loved her, the way she complimented your taste in literature and the smell of your perfume.

“Tell her I say hi?”

He nods. “What about you?”

“Just me and eggnog,” you reply, your tone light, though it falters slightly at the end. “Maybe a movie marathon if I get through the paperwork.”

Spencer laughs gently, the sound brief but warm, like a candle flickering. He shifts on his feet, his eyes tracing the edge of the door before finding yours again.

“Well,” he says, volume dipping into something quieter, more deliberate. “I’ll see you next week.”

“Yeah,” you reply, but you don’t move. The door feels like an end, more final than it should. It’s just a week, you tell yourself, and wills it to comfort you.

Spencer turns toward it, pulling it open just enough to let the cold seep in. She steps halfway through before pausing. He glances back over his shoulder, the light catching in his eyes, and he looks at you like he wants to say something else but thinks better of it.

“I’ll see you,” he repeats..

“Yeah.”.

And then he’s gone, the door swinging shut behind him. You stand there a moment longer before exhaling and pulling your scarf tighter around your neck, then stepping into the cold.

The wind stings your cheeks, but you hardly notice. Something about his words linger loosely long after you’ve begun the drive home.

✶

When you rustle around your sheets that night, tossing and turning, you can only find refuge in the movement of your own wrist against you, fingers slipping in and out, in and out.

“I see you,” you whisper to the empty room.

When you shut your eyes, you do. Brown hair, hazel eyes and all.

✶

There’s a knock at your door. Three short, then one after a beat — like whoever’s on the other side changed their mind halfway through.

You open it and there he is, shoulders dusted in snow like some ghost from a poem. Collar turned up, curls damp, cheeks pink from wind or nerves or both. You blink once, slow, like your brain needs a second to load him.

“I thought you had a flight,” you say, not moving.

“I missed it,” Spencer replies, like that explains anything. Like that doesn’t set your pulse lurching.

You lean against the frame. Not letting him in. Not sending him away either. “Accidentally?”

He huffs a laugh, breath clouding between you. “Only in the sense that I bought the ticket knowing I wouldn’t get on the plane.”

You glance past him — at the streetlight flickering like it’s shivering, at the snow piling quiet and soft on the railing. The air smells like cold metal and unfinished conversations.

“You came all this way just to stand on my porch and be cryptic?” you ask, but your voice gives too much away. It’s not teasing. It’s something slower, more dangerous. Want, laced in denial.

“My mom’s not doing well. I was kidding myself. She—” He looks down, then up again, eyes impossibly warm under all that winter. “She called and told me not to come.

You shift. Bare feet cold on the tile. The heat behind you spilling into the threshold, painting his skin gold.

“Spence—” you start, but the sentence falls apart in your mouth. He’s looking at you like you’re a solution he just solved too late.

“I’m not asking to come in—”

“Come in,” you say, swinging the door open perhaps a little too fast.

He brushes past you but pauses when you’re just an inch apart. He pulls his purple scarf off his shoulders, apologizes softly when snow falls to your floor, melting instantly against the heat.

You tell him it’s fine, lifting a hand to his cheek. Then, quieter: “You’re freezing.”

He smiles, small and wrecked. “Yeah.”

You don’t move, but the distance is shrinking anyway, second by second, breath by breath.

“I missed you,” he says, like it’s the first true thing he’s said in weeks. Maybe months.

And something in you thaws, just slightly. Not much, but enough to say enough to say I know and mean it.

When he kisses you, it feels like he means it.

✶

He doesn’t stay the night under the guise of paperwork. You know what he really means. He doesn’t text the next day, or the day after that, and for some reason this whole break feels like a complete waste if you’re not with him.

On the sixth day, you snap. Your chest is burning, hot and cold all at once. You pick up your phone and type a message to him, fingers trembling.

Are you even thinking about me at all?

The reply comes swiftly: You know I am. After twelve seconds, he clarifies he’s having dinner with a couple friends from college who are in town. You don’t have the dignity to ignore it.

He picks up on the second to last ring.

“I’m at a restaurant.”

“I know.” You didn’t have any words planned. So, you say: “Tell me what you were thinking about.”

“I’m in public.”

“You’re in the bathroom,” you correct. The running sink — which you know is on to hush the sound of your call — audible on the other end of the phone proves your point.

“I was thinking about…” his voice trails off. You can hear him fight it. You will him to lose. “That first time. After that case in—”

“Alabama,” you finish, then slip a hand under the waistband of your yoga pants.

It dissolves into hushed whispers, soft moans, and a slick mess between your thighs. Your back is lifting off the cushion, head pressing hard into the arm of the couch.

“Tell me you love me,” you hear, and don’t register it’s you saying it until silence lolls on the other side of the phone. “Tell me,” you repeat, destined to what you hadn’t meant to say, dropping your volume to a whisper.

He says your name like a warning he’s not sure he wants to call.

“It’s not commitment, Spence,” you plead. “I won’t hold it over your head.”

A few more beats of silence, and you glance at the phone resting atop your knee to see if he had hung up. He hadn’t. You contemplate hanging up yourself.

“I love you.” The words come like the burst of flowers in mid-April. You wave between believing him and recognizing that part of his job is lying. Your fingers roll quicker inside of yourself all the same.

When he repeats it a second time, you come with tears pooling in the dips of your collarbones.

✶

Spencer doesn’t text or call you when he gets back home. That familiar pit slides itself open in your gut. You’re not owed anything, you know this. The pit storms down self-poisoning pellets regardless.

When you see him in the office, Spencer’s some kind of distant, eyes glossed over, devoid of anything you would be able to pick apart. You’re left to analyze the sudden shutout instead.

It wouldn’t be odd to swing by and catch him by the coffee station, you are friends after all. Still, your arrangement leaves you paranoid and anxious and unsure of how to conduct yourself.

It’s outside the bathroom where you catch him three hours later, shaking his slightly damp hands as you walk by.

“Hey,” you say, a little too rushed, and you refrain from wincing. “How was your vacation?” It sounds fake even with all you practiced under your breath sitting at your desk, so you compensate by trying hard to not let it show on your face.

“It was good,” comes Spencer’s reply, before he slides past you and steps in the direction of the bullpen.

“Just good?” you ask. Spencer eyes a person rounding the hallway and into the space you’re both occupying, and you follow his line of sight.

“Mhm.”

“Okay,” you say with a nod, then grab his forearm to drag him farther away from the restroom and into the stairwell. There’s minimal protest on his end, likely to save face, but you take it anyway.

Once you’re inside, you drop your voice to a whisper. “Why didn’t you say anything, call when you got back?”

“I got busy.”

“That’s- that’s a lie,” you huff out. “Please. Please answer.”

He gnaws on your lip like it's a final meal. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not an answer,” you breathe out, on the brink of exasperated laughter. You drop his shoulders as you soften your tone and add: “Don’t be sorry.”

“This is killing me,” he whispers back. “It’s killing me. I—” He cuts himself off, brows furrowing in what looks like distress. “I’m always thinking about you.”

That’s not what he wanted to say, you realize. That’s not what he was going to say. The thought of the alternative words leaving his mouth curdles in your stomach, rises in the form of bile to your throat.

Someone walks into the stairwell and carelessly pushes past you. You fix your posture while Spencer ducks his head and uses the distraction to walk away. Your mouth opens to say something, but you trade it in for silence. You’re not sure what you’re fighting for.

You walk into the bathroom and throw up the contents of your stomach into the shiny white bowl. It feels like honey on its way up.

✶

“Two victims in the last week,” JJ says, passing them all a file before resting on the beige leather couch of the jet. “Both found in their homes, no signs of forced entry, and no evidence of sexual assault or robbery.” She sighs. “Just... gone.”

“They’re being strangled,” Spencer says. “But not with hands… some sort of ligature?”

JJ nods. “The medical examiner says it’s likely something soft, like a scarf or a tie.”

Hotch leans forward, voice calm and direct. “What do we know about the victims?”

“They’re all married women,” Spencer says, voice low as he flips through the beige file. “Late thirties to early forties, no kids, and their spouses were out of town when the murders occurred. The killer left no note, no message.” He glances up. “Like JJ said, it’s like he just wanted them gone.”

Spencer’s shoulders stiffen almost imperceptibly, but you catch it.

“Could be someone they knew,” Morgan says, his tone contemplative. “If there’s no sign of a break-in, they let the killer in willingly. Someone they trusted.”

“Someone they trusted but didn’t suspect,” you murmur.

Spencer glances down at you, and your eyes meet for the briefest moment before he looks away.

✶

Your hotel room stays dark. The file lay unopened on your desk. There’s a mini fridge you stare at, like even the presence of unsipped alcohol might just do the trick. You hate that he’s letting this impact your job, which doesn’t stop you from doing so.

With your back against the mattress, you raise a fist, then knock against the yellow wall.

No one knocks back.

✶

Emily cracks the case — a woman, she realizes, when it all feels too much like jealousy. The unsub, a thirty-something woman named Victoria Ackers, doesn’t put up much of a fight when Morgan kicks down her front door.

“It should’ve been me,” Victoria wails when you put her in cuffs. “How come they got to be loved, and I didn’t?”

You rarely sympathize with the people you lock up. This isn’t an exception.

Still, you place Victoria in loose cuffs, and when it comes to closing the door of the cop car, you close it softly.

✶

You go home alone and wait until three. Spencer doesn’t come.

When you finally lie in bed, it feels like a grave.

✶

You’re running on three weeks of sleep deprivation when you decide to approach him. It’s long after work is supposed to be over, and the only person left in the office beside them is Hotch, who can barely be seen through the pile of paperwork adorning his desk.

Spencer has concerned himself in an online debate forum on the overuse of arguing against the cosmological argument in atheist literature to notice you slipping into his view, pulling Morgan’s chair around to sit in it.

“Hey,” you speak first. You wait for him to invite you into a conversation.

“Hi,” he says, moving his mouse away from his hand.

“I figured we should…”

“Talk?” Spencer guesses.

“Talk, yeah.” You bite your lip.

“I didn’t mean to shut you out.”

“But you did.” The words have little bite in them.

“I’m—”

“You don’t have to say it.”

“I want to.” A beat passes. You allow it. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” you say after several long seconds. You surprise yourself with the sureness behind the meaning of it.

“What do you have to be sorry for?”

You don't respond. You watch his shoulders drop. “Oh.”

“It’s okay,” you assure. “This… isn’t how it’s supposed to be.” Your eyes stall a moment too long on the team photo atop his desk, the only photo he has up. Like it’s instinctive, Spencer fiddles with a file on his desk.

“So… it’s just over.”

You don’t have anything to say — he hadn’t posed it as a question. You’re not sure where you’re going when you stand, but you stand regardless. You pause as you shove things in your bag back at your desk. “I was lying, by the way,” you say. “In Tallahassee, when I said I didn’t want you.”

You could stick around to see what Spencer has in response, but you don’t. It’ll hurt at the same rate, whatever it is.

✶

It felt like finality, so you go to bed early. It isn’t an easy feat, and it feels nothing like winning.

With your eyes shut, sleeping but not dreaming, you aren’t expecting the pounding sound that’s coming from your door, the intensity of it to jolt you awake. Too delirious from a lingering state of hypnagogia, you swing the door open without checking to see who it is first. Spencer stands there, soaked through his long-sleeved shirt. You weren’t even aware it was raining.

It happens fast, Spencer’s lips against yours. He kisses you the way you had kissed him back in Tallahassee, rough and cleaving you open like a god that doesn’t belong. You don’t have to work hard to meet the same level of desire.

“What are you doing?” you get out between kisses, stepping backward as you head to your room with Spencer still pulled close to you.

“Please don’t ask any questions right now.”

So you don’t. Instead, you let him strip you of your clothes, soothe your surprised body with a palm on the small of your back as he leads you to lie on the bed.

“You’re freezing,” you mention. A droplet of water cascades down his hair and lands on your cheekbone, then another on your shoulder until your whole body seems wet.

“It’s raining.”

“I gathered.”

You’re wet somewhere else, too, you think, as he dips his hand between your legs and leaves feather-light touches against your core.

“Please,” you whisper.

“Please what?”

“Touch me.”

“I am touching you, honey.” He’s teasing you, you know. He wants you to beg. It’s so rare he gets you at his mercy. In moments like these, you can tell he savors it. Relishes in it.

Instead of responding, you grab at his wrist, forcing his fingers inside of yourself. Spencer lets out something akin to a moan even though it's not him on the receiving end.

You think he likes you like this, wide open for him. Your lips are parted, like you’re one big portal Spencer can slide into, move his tongue against, curl his fingers in. He takes the opportunity, pushes his pointer and middle into your mouth and lets you clamp around them. You suck, causing him to instinctively up the pace of his other hand like it’s a reward.

“Thought we weren’t gonna show up anymore,” he says. He curls his fingers to reach that one spot he knows makes your pupils blow. You push back the thought that he might’ve found that spot on other women, too. Worse, the thought that someone might’ve taught him where it is. “But you let me in. So what happened to that, hm?”

You mumble something incoherent around his fingers, so he pulls them out and grabs you by the chin instead. “Go ahead.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t what?”

“Keep you out.”

You want him to kiss you then, but don't know if that’s too intimate. You opt for bucking your hips against his hand instead. It takes another calculated curl of his fingers before you tighten around them, legs shutting tight as you ride it out.

“I wanna do something for you,” you say. Your breathing is slow again but your legs are still shaking a little. Spencer grabs the opportunity to spread them.

“Yeah? You’re sweet.” He pulls you farther up the bed, spreads your legs and slots himself inside of you. There’s a gasp at the connection, though you’re unsure which one of you it comes from. It might’ve been simultaneous.

You watch his eyes gloss over as he allows himself this one moment of selfishness, fucking you harder. You hold him by the face and feel your authority dissipate. The whole ordeal is shrewd and loud and messy, and a drop of sweat collects at the top of your spine and slithers its way down. It feels like a raw kind of heaven; like you’re pulling apart.

Pleasure is a tight coil in the bottom of your stomach, in the tips of your fingertips, in the curling of your toes — some invisible lyre strung with vibrating wire, sticky with the friction of nearness.

When you come, you’re crying. You glance down. Spencer looks impassioned, too, so you kiss him to hush you both.

When his lips leave yours, pull from yours, you feel the absence as acutely as the touch itself. The tender ache threads like grating twine through your chest. He leans his forehead against yours, breath mingling, shallow and uneven.

The silence between you is its own language, so you don’t speak. You don’t trust yourself to. You focus on the curve of his jaw, the faint quiver in his lips, the way his eyelashes cling together with sweat — or maybe unfallen tears.

He pulls away first, his hands slipping from your grasp. He sits up, turning his back, shoulders tense in the way they always are after release proves itself to be fleeting. For a moment, you want to reach out, to pull him back into the bed, but the weight in his posture tells you it won’t matter.

“I wasn’t lying, though,” Spencer whispers, back turned to you as he sits at the edge of the bed, “when I said I loved you.”

Your gaze settles on the curve of his spine, the way it rises and falls with each uneven breath. Your hands twitch against the rumpled sheets, caught in the futile instinct to reach for him. You curl your fingers into fists, nails biting into your palms. Your throat tightens, swallows the air before it can reach your lungs. The dim light catches on the slope of his shoulder, illuminating a vulnerability you’re not sure you’re meant to see.

Emboldened by newfound fulfillment of self-interest, you crawl toward the edge of the bed where he sits and kiss his back.

In a few moments, Spencer will leave. You know this. This time is different, though.

You know he’s not coming back.

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