almost generally always

*~*~*

"How does it work?" Spencer asks.

You're driving back from interviewing a witness and none of you have said anything for the past 15 minutes.

You throw your mind back to the topics you've discussed so far on this trip, wondering if he means cold fusion (which he was the one explaining to you), credit card fraud, or house training a puppy.

"I mean, how do you actually do it?"

So, hopefully not the credit card fraud.

"Do what?"

"Kiss your date." Clearly this conversation has been happening inside his head for a while and you're the stupid one for not keeping up.

"You know how to kiss, Reid," you say, exasperated. You know for a fact that he knows how to do that. You've spent entirely too much time thinking about the fact that he knows how to do that exactly the way you like. Which is your own fault, really, in a way. You suppose.

He blushes, just a little, enough to turn the tips of his ears red and give his cheeks a windswept kind of glow. What an annoying look on him. "No. You said, 'if you feel like she’s giving the right signals, you can kiss her' at the end of a date. But how do I know?"

Ohhh.

"You just have to read the signals she's sending and then respond accordingly. You're a profiler, this isn't rocket science."

"No, rocket science is a lot simpler, actually," he says. You'd laugh but you know he isn't joking. "This has too many variables."

"Okay." You pull the car onto the shoulder and turn off the engine, then unfasten your seatbelt and turn so you're facing him. "Let's try it this way."

He turns his head towards you. "Which way?"

"Do you think I want to kiss you right now?" you ask, looking at him with a blank face.

"I never think you want to kiss me," he says with the same kind of certainty usually reserved for telling you that you're wrong about why leaves are green, actually.

Wow. Okay. Maybe your dad was wrong: there is a god and prayer really works?

You tilt your head and stare at his lips, smiling a little. "And now?"

"Um." Spencer shifts in his seat, his eyes roaming over the dashboard before they return to you.

You lick your lips, thinking about the way his tongue feels on your nipple, the way it felt on your clit. Arousal ties a knot in your stomach at the memory, and you're pretty sure it's enough to make your pupils dilate. "How about now?" you ask, your eyes still on his mouth.

This is definitely a mistake, you're realising, because by this point you really, really do want him to kiss you.

"Yes?" He says it like a question, but also maybe like he's asking permission, almost a whisper.

You reach out a hand and run your thumb over his pouty lower lip, leaning a little closer to him. "Now?"

He nods, lips puckering slightly as if he's about to suck your thumb into his mouth. But then he squeezes his eyes shut, pulling back a little and shaking his head. "Stop it."

You're relieved his eyes are closed so he doesn't see the way your face falls. "What?"

"My date's not going to do that. Stop making it too easy."

"Are you calling me easy, Reid?" you joke, your mind snagging on the 'my date'. That doesn't sound very hypothetical at all. That sounds like he already has someone in mind. You pull your shoulders back and take a deep breath, recalibrating.

He opens his eyes again, looking at you, eyes widening when he sees your expression. Clearly he's worried he offended you, which isn't the worst assumption he could be making. "No-no, that's not what I meant." He shakes his head. "I mean, nothing about you is easy."

You're not sure you were actually meant to hear that last part. "Then what?"

"You're just being too obvious, you'd never actually look at me like that if you weren't making a point."

You know for a fact that you've looked at him exactly like that several times before, but usually not before anything happens, which you assume is his point. You work your mouth from side to side, trying to figure out how to explain to him. "Do you want to kiss me?"

"What?" He frowns, eyes straying to your lips.

"Right now, do you want to kiss me?"

He sighs. "Yes." It sounds like the admission is physically painful to him.

"Good."

"No, it's not," he says, frustration coming off him in waves.

"How do you think you're looking at me?" you ask, ignoring his protests.

"Like you're the only meal I want to eat for the rest of my life."

Which, fuck. Not what you expected him to say. At all. The words shoot straight to your core and every cell in your body wants you to just straddle him and get his hands on you, but you're pretty sure he'd stop you again and putting in for a transfer to get over the humiliation just feels like too much paperwork so you stay where you are. "But how do you think it looks to me?" you ask instead, trying to keep your voice light, as if he didn't just punch you in the gut with his words.

His eyebrows shoot up and he grimaces. "Pathetic?"

"No, Reid," you groan, frustrated. "No."

He looks at you like he doesn't believe a word you're saying.

"Okay," you say, trying again. "Look at me and think about kissing me."

He looks at you but his expression doesn't change at all.

"Are you… are you thinking about it?"

His eyes narrow just slightly when you speak but then readjust. "Yes."

You genuinely can't tell. At all. Just to see if anything will happen, you bite your lower lip.

His jaw clenches.

You smile.

He shakes his head like he's clearing a fog and then he looks at you again. "What was the point of this exercise?"

"I honestly don't know anymore," you admit.

"Great."

"Look, Reid, it's not an exact science. I mean, clearly. It's more of a vibe."

"A vibe?"

"Yeah. You're never going to be 100% sure. That's part of what makes it fun." You realise this isn't going to fit his definition of fun. "Just think of it like a game of chess. What will happen if you move your lip pawn to capture her lip pawn?"

"I'll be check-mated by her slap queen?" His answer comes so quickly you wonder if he already considered it this way.

"Or your pawns have a cute little kiss and decide you both win," you suggest brightly. "Look, if you feel like the date went well and your chemistry is good, try for a kiss. If you aren't sure, you can ask for permission. You have that whole wounded puppy thing going for you, most women will probably find it endearing if you ask."

You think the taste in your mouth might be bile.

He considers your suggestion, then tilts his head to the side. "Wounded puppy?" You're pretty sure he has never looked more like one than he does right now.

You smile. "It's not a bad thing, okay."

He licks his lips, nodding thoughtfully, and then he looks you in the eye. "Can I kiss you?"

"Yeah, like that," you say, nodding, reminding yourself that he's not actually asking you, he's just practising.

But he reaches out to cup your cheek, pulling you towards him like his hand is a magnet until you're stretched over the centre console, and then he moves to press his lips to yours. He's still watching you when your eyes flutter closed.

His lips move against yours, soft and gentle, very much how you imagine he'd first kiss someone on a date. No expectations, respectful. Then he pulls back and you open your eyes to find him still watching you.

"Can I kiss you again?" he asks, lips curling up slightly.

"No," you say, leaning in before he can react. "My turn."

You are the opposite of soft and gentle, but he clearly doesn't mind, his hands grabbing your head and holding you in place as if he has some opinions on exactly who's kissing who here. He explores your mouth with his tongue like he's looking for something, and you realise you're losing this battle fast, so you stroke your tongue against his in a way that hasn't failed to get a reaction from him yet.

It works, again.

He moans into your mouth, not breaking the kiss but moving a hand down to release his seatbelt and then he's all but pulling you into his lap until you're straddling him, the lack of space preventing you from getting as close to him as you want because there's nowhere for your legs to go — as close as he clearly wants you as well, the way he keeps tugging on you by the waist until he realises why you're not moving. He tries to slide down in his seat but you hear his knees connect with the dashboard and then he winces in pain without breaking the kiss.

His tongue still in your mouth, distracting you, he unbuttons your shirt and then pushes it off your shoulders along with your top and bra until you're wearing them all like a straightjacket with your breasts exposed. Pretty appropriate, really, considering how insane this is. You're parked on the shoulder of a Montana highway, for Christ's sake. Tinted windows, sure, but this is still very much a traffic violation that could have cops knocking on those tinted windows at any time. But his hands are on your breasts, squeezing them and then finding your nipples and who cares if it's crazy as long as he doesn't stop.

You moan, your hips bucking against him, finding absolutely no friction.

He breaks the kiss, pushing you back against the dashboard so he can lean down and get your breast in his mouth, pausing only long enough to mumble, sounding almost reverent, "I never thought I'd get to do this again." Which is an odd thing to say, considering that the point of all of this is for him to get dates and then presumably… do these things with them.

His mouth isn't even touching you yet and already your hips are chasing him helplessly at the sound of his voice, as if your body thinks the words are for you. He notices and pushes a hand between your bodies, fingers rubbing you roughly. Even through the layers of clothes he knows exactly where to push into you to put pressure on your clit.

"Fuck," you moan, caught up in the feeling of finally having his hands on you again. "Yes."

Suddenly he stops rubbing you, and you're about to protest, because although his tongue on your nipple feels just as amazing as you remember it, a few seconds ago it all felt even more amazing, but then you realise he's unbuttoning your slacks and swallow your objections, letting a moan spill from your lips instead when he sucks your nipple into his mouth.

But he doesn't push his hand down your underwear the way you expect him to, the way you want him to. He takes your hand and guides it there, pushing your whole hand down your panties until your fingers are parting your folds and feeling how wet you are from his touch.

"What's this, Reid?" you ask, intrigued. Nothing about his behaviour in the past has suggested that he doesn't enjoy getting you off, so he must be doing this for a reason.

"I want to watch you," he says as he moves from one breast to the other, sucking on it until it's glistening with his saliva and the nipple is hard, and then he pulls back just long enough to finish what he was saying. "Touching yourself until you come."

You grin, pulling your other hand free from your clothes, reaching up and scratching your nails along his scalp, enjoying the feeling of him humming against you. "Okay."

He pulls back, looking at you in surprise. "Really?"

"Sure." You don't really understand why it feels like a big deal to him, especially with the current setup where he won't actually be able to see anything at all, but he looks genuinely excited at the prospect.

But then your finger finds your clit, circling it, and you realise he didn't mean what you thought he meant, because his eyes are on your face, not on what your hand is doing, and suddenly you feel self-conscious, your hand stilling.

He notices immediately, just from your expression. "Don't stop," he says, wide-eyed. "Please."

"I—" you say, then stop yourself, not sure what to say. How do you tell him that this feels too intimate when just a few weeks ago you were perfectly happy for him to fuck you with his tongue?

You move his left hand to your breast, because maybe if he's touching you, you can distract yourself a little, and he seems to get it, his thumb and index finger finding your nipple and tweaking it carefully. You huff out a breath of air at the sensation and go back to touching yourself, closing your eyes so you can't see him watching you.

From the way his breathing halts, you know he's about to say something, probably tell you to open your eyes, but he doesn't, just reaches out a hand to brush the hair out of your face. He continues to touch you like this, one hand on your breast in a way you're tempted to ask him to teach you, the other gently stroking your face while you rub your clit roughly, desperately, moaning and sighing.

"So pretty," he murmurs, fingers stroking along your jawline.

You hum in response, wondering just what it is about the way sweat is trickling down your forehead and making the hair stick to your skin that's so pretty exactly. You open your eyes to check that it's even you he's looking at.

It is. It definitely is. His eyes are glued to your face, pupils blown and mouth hanging slightly open, a fascinated smile painted all over his face. When your eyes meet, his smile grows. Your orgasm hits you faster than you expected and you come with a series of whimpers and your eyes locked on his, unable to look away from him, your hand falling from his hair to his shoulder to keep you steady.

Through the haze of your orgasm you think you might hear him whisper "perfect," to himself, but you may just be imagining it because he sort of looks like that's what he's thinking. Which you may also just be imagining.

Your breathing slowly returns to normal and you pull your hand out of your panties, squirming to free your arm from the restraints of your clothes by pushing them back up your arm, using your free hand to pull the straps of your bra and tank top back on your shoulder. Spencer watches first one breast disappear from view and then the other as you put your clothes on properly, a small frown on his face like he wants to argue with you because maybe he's not done playing with his friends yet.

Once your shirt is back on, he reaches out and adjusts a few of the buttons, his fingers brushing your chest. It's the most obvious ploy in the history of ploys and when you shake your head at him, he at least has the decency to blush a little.

He studies your face for a moment, then leans forward to kiss you. When he pulls away, he looks at you very carefully, his smile slightly uncertain. "You looked like you wouldn't mind me kissing you."

You snort. "Reid, unless you paid a hooker for the privilege, if you've just watched a woman come, it's pretty safe to assume you're allowed to kiss her."

"Noted," he says, grabbing your hips to steady you as you crawl back to your own seat.

You look down, buckling yourself back in, and as soon as you look up, his lips are on you again, one hand on the centre console for balance, the other stroking your cheek. When he finally pulls back, you feel out of breath and out of place and just a little lost.

"How long after is it safe to make that assumption?" he asks, knuckles still tracing your jawline.

It takes you a moment to remember what he's talking about. You're not sure what the appropriate answer is, and you don't want to have to think about it too hard, because then you might just realise that when it comes to you, the truth is he's always safe to assume it's allowed.

And that's not something you need to be aware of.

Before you can come up with a reply, his phone rings. He answers and puts it on speaker. "Hey, boss," you say just as Spencer opens his mouth to talk. He shakes his head at you instead, which you're pretty sure means that you don't win the race if he isn't running.

"I thought I called—" Hotch begins but then cuts himself off. "Never mind. Where the hell are you guys?"

"Not sure," Spencer says honestly, looking around. "Highway."

"Well, hurry up and get back here, they found another body."

You turn the key in the ignition and start the car.

"We'll be right there," Spencer says and hangs up the phone, gingerly shoving it back in his pocket.

You glance over and realise what the reason for that is: He's rock hard. "Do you want to drive?" you ask, eyes on his crotch.

He sees what you're looking at. "No? What difference would that make?"

"You heard Hotch, we don't really have time to hang around here any longer, but if you're driving I can—"

"No, thanks," he cuts you off firmly.

"What, so you hate blowjobs now?"

He lets out a strangled sound, then takes a steadying breath. "I'd crash the car."

You laugh and he squeezes his eyes shut. He probably would, actually.

"You know what they say," you muse, pulling back onto the deserted highway, heading back towards reality. "If you're gonna die in a fatal car crash, at least make the coroner's report interesting."

"No-one has said that, ever," he says. "Just drive and leave me alone."

"For how long?"

"Probably longer than you'd still want me to kiss you," he mutters, staring out the window.

"Okay, dude," you say, shaking your head.

You don't speak to him for the rest of the day because maybe he can just tell you when he's over himself, you're not going to spend your time guessing. Everyone else notices but doesn't comment on it, just assuming the two of you had another fight about something no-one cares about, probably including you both.

Spencer, however, watches you carefully all day, right up until you nod goodnight to him, JJ and Morgan as you leave the elevator back at the hotel. When the doors close, his head is tilted to the side, brows furrowed, but the last thing you see is a smile spreading on face.

*~*~*

It’s not fair, maybe, but Spencer still blames you for how it happened. At most, he’ll compromise and call it an accident. But an accident you're mostly responsible for.

He’s never been away from work for this long, not once since Gideon first showed him around the bullpen and then pointed to a desk with an air of ‘you live here now, my foundling’, but things were bad with his mother after Randall Garner, and the increasingly frustrating phone calls with the administrator at the sanatorium and the guilt eating him up from the inside had meant he eventually went to Hotch and asked for a week.

One week.

Not unheard of.

People take time off for all sorts of reasons all the time.

Except not Spencer.

Spencer doesn’t take time off, but this one single time he did, missed a whole case. Hotch didn’t even call and ask him to come back, just left him to get on with his personal life, like the team wasn’t already a man down after Elle left.

Which means that when he does come back, everything is different. Even more so than it was when he left.

And that is your fault.

He has this constant feeling in his body, this unseizing discomfort, the same way he feels when a painting is askew or he sees someone put their fingers in the sugar jar in the kitchenette. This constant scratching of nails on a blackboard. Your nails. Or maybe you are the nails, he can’t decide.

It’s not fair, it’s not reasonable, it’s not rational, but it’s how he feels:

It’s all your fault.

Because he comes back and you’re just there. Sitting at a desk and making small-talk with JJ about where to get the best pizza in DC, giving Morgan the finger when he calls you Calamity Jane. Like you belong and you already have rapport with people who find Spencer a puzzle most of the time, and not necessarily one they want to solve.

And when they spot you, JJ just says, “Oh, there he is. This is Spencer,” like that means something to you. Then, and only then, does anyone tell him that you exist, much less your name and the fact that you’re part of the team now.

You don’t reach out a hand for him to shake, you just wave without getting out of your seat. You don't do that because you aren't friendly, you do it because someone told you not to try to shake his hand. 

You were warned.

Spencer was in Las Vegas dealing with things and then he was blindsided.

So, yeah, screw you, actually.

He waves back with what you later describe to Penelope as ‘a severe lack of enthusiasm’ (Penelope finds this hilarious for reasons you don’t understand) and then sits down at his desk, ignoring you completely.

Maybe if he can pretend you aren’t here for a while, he can wrap his head around the fact that you are in fact here before he has to deal with you again and it’ll all be fine.

Except, then you go and offer to bring him a coffee ten minutes later and it’s not enough time and he can feel his jaw go tense and there’s a stabbing sensation above his left eyebrow, and he decides it’s you who’s giving him a headache, not the fluorescent light above the next desk that’s blinking away like it thinks it’s auditioning to be a strobe light.

You see him looking at the overhead light and squinting. “The janitor promised he’d fix it today,” you say reassuringly. Which is the sort of thing you’d know, because you belong here now.

Spencer pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes and doesn’t say anything.

You wait for another few seconds and then mutter, “okay,” as you walk away.

When you come back, you’re just carrying one mug of coffee, and he eyes it as you set it down on your desk but then quickly turns away when you catch him looking and pull a face at him. It’s possible that when Spencer first became an agent, people treated him like a child and maybe he kind of looked like one from certain angles, but unlike you, at least he didn’t act like one.

But you leave him alone after that, don’t talk to him at all for the rest of the day, or the next. You’re not outright ignoring him, which is also kind of annoying because it makes it look like Spencer is the mean one. You just sort of… sidestep him, somehow managing to either evade or derail any conversation he’s in without actually looking like that’s what you’re doing.

Spencer would be impressed if it wasn’t so annoying, the way it's obvious to him that you’re being deliberately rude but everyone seems to miss it.

The way you actually smirk at him while everyone else looks oh so impressed by your wit. Spencer is tempted to mime that he’s gagging, feels kind of proud of himself for suppressing the impulse and then intensely frustrated that no-one knows how well he’s behaving because it looks like he’s just being normal.

And then you snort as you walk away, as if you know what he nearly did. Which really pisses him off.

So he starts interrupting you. Not in obvious ways, just dropping pens right as you hit your stride, banging his head loudly and deliberately on the table when he picks it back up, making everyone look at him instead of at you; shuffling papers around and accidentally hiding what you were looking at until you’re forced to ask him to give you the picture or report or whatever it is; taking the last cup of coffee from the pot so you have to make more and wait around for it to brew while he can get back to work and being clever as you contribute absolutely nothing, leaning against the counter in the kitchenette.

That last one backfires when it has him drinking old, lukewarm coffee that no amount of sugar can save and maybe watching you drink it would have been more satisfying.

By the end of his second week back, subtle hostilities have turned into an outright war. Not a violent, fast-paced one, but a slow, steady battle, arguments that can last for days like they’re games of chess, abandoned when you need to concentrate on work, picked back up later when you’re free to focus on it as if no time has passed at all.

If this had been an intellectual debate with someone he respected, Spencer might have enjoyed it, but instead it’s just trading insults with you, who he actively dislikes, and there’s nothing enjoyable about it.

In fact, the only thing that makes it even remotely worthwhile, is that it’s clear that it frustrates you just as much.

Some days, actually, that’s enough to make him smile.

Everyone else has noticed, too, but not at all surprisingly, none of them seem to care. The only exception is Penelope who flat out refuses to let you both come into her office at the same time, ‘in case the energy from your hostilities causes a short circuit.’ 

Which is not how electricity works and Spencer tries to explain that to her, but she’s adamant and says something about juju and he gives up just in time to see you bite your lip in amusement from the doorway.

He very nearly forgets that you’re the enemy, which means he almost pulls a face and shakes his head at you, but luckily he manages to catch himself just in time.

Instead, he squeezes past you out of the office, back scraping against the doorframe to stay as far away from you as possible, head bent back so he doesn’t accidentally make eye-contact with you.

It means he misses your eye-roll but he doesn’t miss the way you ask Penelope ‘What the hell that guy’s problem is?’

Spencer has never been ‘that guy’ in his life, the way you sound like you mean it, but he can absolutely tell you what his problem is if you want to know. 

Because it’s you.

You’re the problem.

*~*~*

The seating arrangement on the jet is sub-optimal. Spencer should have paid better attention when he picked a place to sit, but he was tired and preoccupied and didn't notice that it was your cardigan in the seat across from the one he chose.

He did notice the confused look Morgan shot him when he sat down, and the way your eyes widened in surprise when you came back from the galley with a bottle of water to find him sitting across from the seat you already selected.

Spencer almost got up to find a different place to sit, but everyone else had settled and the only option would be to ask JJ or Hotch to get up to let him take one of the window seats in the four seat island they were occupying, which felt just a little too childish so he stayed.

It's not that he particularly minds sitting across from you, it's more the fact that you've started wearing lipstick all of a sudden, and he knows you're doing it to make him look at your mouth and think about the way your lips were wrapped around…

He also knows that it's working.

So, sub-optimal for some pretty humiliating reasons, but at least it's only a few hours and then he just has to finish up his paperwork before he can go home and not think about you or your lips.

No, really.

The jet is barely in the air before you and Morgan, who's sitting across the aisle from Spencer, are deep in a conversation that starts with - Spencer thinks but isn't sure - football, definitely some type of sport, segues into the weather in Chicago, before somehow arriving at Bigfoot.

Spencer is not going to get involved, but then Morgan says something that's just so inaccurate he can't help himself and he opens his mouth.

"No," you and Spencer both say at the same time, equally emphatic. "Absolutely not."

"Wait," JJ says, looking between you. "Did you two just agree on something?"

"I think we can probably all agree that Morgan is wrong," you suggest, not looking at Spencer.

"No, we cannot," Morgan argues, pulling a face at you.

JJ points a finger first at you and then at Spencer. "I think for this kind of peace we probably can, actually."

"I agree," Hotch says, not looking up from his file.

"Wow." Morgan holds up both hands and gets out of his seat. As he walks away, he pushes the back of Spencer's head forward, messing up his hair.

"Hey!" Spencer swivels around to look at him. "What did I do?!"

"I don't know, kid, but I'm gonna find out." He waves a hand at JJ to make her move into the window seat so he can take the aisle.

Spencer turns back in his seat slowly, sinking down slightly. Whatever Morgan thinks he's looking for, Spencer really hopes he doesn't find anything too… relevant. He can feel his ears get red and fights himself not to look at you when he hears you chuckling.

With Morgan watching him, that would probably be a very bad idea, the redness would almost certainly spread. He gets his book out of his satchel; if he's looking at that, he's not looking at you.

It works, for about ten minutes. Then he feels you nudging his foot and realises just how far into his seat he has sunk. He's basically taking up all the legroom you're meant to be sharing by this point, so he shifts to make space for your feet beside his.

When you continue to nudge him, he double-checks that you have enough space and then goes back to his book, ignoring you.

He's not sure how long it's been since your nudges changed to rhythmic taps but he's sure it's been a while by the time his brain finally registers that you're tapping his foot using morse code.

He stops reading and pays attention.

O-b-s-b-o-o-b-s-b-o-o. He moves his foot away, looking at you with what he hopes is disapproval, but discreet. Except you don't see it because you're doing a sudoku and seem completely focused on it, but Spencer knows you don't like sudokus enough to account for the smile that's playing on your lips.

He taps back s-t-o-p.

Your smile widens as you write another number. Then your foot moves. N-i-p-p-l— Spencer pulls his feet away. You move your legs slightly, adjusting in your seat, but other than that, you don't react.

Spencer moves his feet back and starts tapping out M-o-r-g-a-n.

"Derek?" you call out loudly as soon as he's done, and Spencer freezes, wide-eyed.

"Unless you're about to confess what you've done to make the boy genius agree with you, I'm not interested," Morgan says without opening his eyes.

"Why are you assuming I'm the one who did something?" You sound so put out, Spencer almost believes you're genuinely offended until he looks at you. "Why couldn't it be him?"

Spencer tries to communicate with his eyes that you're playing this wrong, you basically just admitted that someone did something. This is a thread for Derek to pull at and he's not going to stop. But of course you don't care, because you have far less to hide than Spencer does.

Morgan laughs, opening his eyes and turning so he can look back at you. "Really?"

"He's the genius, why not an evil genius?"

"That seems unfair," Spencer says, because he assumes that's what you want him to do. You smile at him and he feels stupidly pleased.

"He's the genius, you're the evil," Morgan says like he just proved a mathematical theorem. Which he did not, Spencer almost opens his mouth to point out, but then you start tapping his foot again.

D-r-e-v-i-l.

Spencer feels his lips twitch and worries for a second that Morgan can somehow see it through the back of the seat.

"I just don't think that's fair. Couldn't he have hypnotised me or something?" you say out loud, then you turn to look at Spencer. "Do you know how to hypnotise people? Does that count as science magic?"

"If he did, you'd be making a lot more chicken noises," Derek says, getting out of his seat and coming to stand next to Spencer, leaning an elbow on the back of his seat.

"Hypnotising someone without their consent is highly unethical," Spencer points out.

"See?" Derek pulls an 'I'm right' face and points at Spencer. "Genius." Then at you. "Evil."

You look at Spencer but be doesn't say anything. So you open your mouth and say in a monotone. "Your conclusion is false, there is no inherent correlation between Reid's intelligence and my morals."

Everyone looks at you, including Spencer.

"What in the Freaky Friday is going on?" Derek asks.

"Huh?" Spencer turns to him, confused.

"Never mind."

You snort. "You need to accept that you were just that wrong and let it go, Morgan."

"Never," he insists, pointing two fingers at his eyes and then at you, but he goes back to his seat.

Spencer waits about five seconds and then releases the breath he was holding. Which he didn't really need to do, actually, because all of Derek's attention was aimed at you.

How did you do that, and was it on purpose?

Spencer is still trying to decide what the answer to that question is when you start tapping his foot again. R-e-l-a-x.

He shakes his head without looking at you because how is he meant to do that? You may have diffused a situation you created yourself, but it doesn't really change the fact that Morgan suspects that there's something to suspect, and it definitely doesn't change the fact that he's right.

You just don't know about it.

When you hand him your book of sudokus and your pen, it feels like an apology. But that interpretation was clearly incorrect, he realises, when you start tapping his foot again.

B-l-o-w-j-o—Spencer twitches and crosses out a 'two' he added to an incorrect field. Glancing at you as he adjusts his glasses, he can see you smirking. He wants to pull his foot away, but you'd see that as him admitting defeat, so he bravely sits still as you continue to spell out rude words against his foot, describing body-parts and various sexual activities he can close his eyes and visualise engaging in. With you.

This is probably how difficult sudokus are for normal people, he concludes, staring at the numbers while your foot against his spells out keywords from some of his dirtiest fantasies. It doesn't leave all that much focus for adding numbers to little boxes, and by the time the jet begins its descent at Quantico he has only managed to finish half the book.

How embarrassing, how predictable. How… exactly what you'd want.

He hands the book back to you. He should have just pushed it across the table, but he figured making you take it from him would distract you from spelling out 'ejaculation'. Except it backfires when his fingers accidentally brush against yours and now it's not just his mind that's on fire, his hand is as well. That's the kind of fire that spreads, leading to blushes and awkward shuffling and Morgan noticing things.

So when the plane lands Spencer stays in his seat until everyone else is leaving, ignoring the way you look at him with your head tilted slightly before you walk past him and down the aisle to the exit.

*˜*˜*

In the end, Claire has to organise the move for you. You get stuck in Moscow for two weeks longer than planned, some cock-up with the handover, the station chief doing the absolute least to facilitate the transition.

It makes no sense to you, you hate each other pretty equally, he should be as eager to get rid of you as you are to leave.

But to some people it’s more important to make others suffer than to get what they want themselves.

It feels too stupid to be real, but you know better than to argue. You’re too young, too female for anyone to actually listen to you. But still: strings are being pulled behind the scenes and one way or another, you’re going home. Eventually. 

You practically begged, and it’s not a memory you treasure, but desperate times and all that. Which is why you’re going to DC instead of back to New York, even if that’s what you originally asked for. You blend in well enough in Moscow at first glance but you long for the anonymity of New York City, to get away from the Americans abroad community that puts its claws into anyone who even walks past Spaso House. The wink-wink-nudge-nudge, aren’t we so clever and witty as we say nostrovia and down vodka someone ‘forgot’ when they came for a meeting. 

What you want is to vanish, be unknown. Something about the way New Yorkers will let you be completely invisible unless you really force them to stare. You miss the freedom of it.

To compensate for the posting not being what you wanted, they let you choose your own accommodation, no limits except they get to vet the place. A proper home, something you can make permanent if you want. You can’t imagine ever wanting to stay in the Capital, but you’ll take it. You’ve spent the last five years in furnished Company apartments, hating the wallpaper in every single one of them. So you look up places online, your mom of all people goes to the viewings. Travels down from New Hampshire and acts like you’re asking her to walk there, never mind the fact that she offered to go. She narrows it down to a top three, you pick the one she likes the least. 

Simon - the real reason you accepted DC, he’s the nicest boss you ever had and you trust him implicitly, even with the small stuff - makes sure the place is checked out properly. Doesn’t tell you anything except that it’s fine and then he forges your signature on the lease before someone else can snap the place up.

Best boss ever.

Claire is under strict orders not to touch any of your stuff and you think Simon must’ve had a word, because when you finally get there everything is still in boxes, held together by timeworn masking tape, furniture just put down in random places. The only thing that looks deliberate is the couch, pushed against a wall with a view to the windows.

Claire can never completely help herself, but for the most controlling woman alive this is pretty good.

And never mind, it’s just a couch, you can move it to where you want it. You’ll have to invite her around sometime, once you’re settled in, just to let her see you moved it.

You get three days to unpack before your new assignment starts, which is a luxury you know not to take for granted, and you spend your days getting reacquainted with your own stuff after 5 years of it sitting in a storage locker, throwing away things you don’t remember why you saved, replacing stuff you decide you no longer like. 

By the end of day two, the place feels like yours, on day three a handyman comes in and drills holes in the walls and ceilings where you’ve made marks, putting up shelves and lamps and pictures. You found the guy on Craigslist and watch him like a hawk until he leaves, admitting to yourself that it was probably a mistake. Simon could have found someone to do this and you wouldn’t have to spend seven hours not able to leave the room.

Then work starts and you settle into a routine, or as much of one as it’s possible to have with your kind of work. 

Simon asks after a few months if you’ve gotten to know your neighbours, this smug grin like he knows you. He vetted them himself, what the hell are you meant to do? Make friends? Hilarious.

You’re vaguely aware of the guy in the apartment next to yours, whose working hours are as insane as your own, possibly even worse. Long stretches of complete silence on the other side of your shared walls when he’s away; long days of quiet followed by muted classical music or occasionally jazz, takeaway deliveries, and the tell-tale sound of water in shared pipes revealing that tonight, he’s home. 

Weeks can go by, a month maybe, where you don’t see him at all, but then you run into him in the hallway, one of you coming, the other going, or both of you leaving at some ungodly hour, or coming home at a time that’s even less reasonable. You never see or hear anyone else in there, just him. Without knowing anything else about him, and without really needing to, you feel a kind of kinship with this man who lives a life that’s apparently as solitary as your own.

He looks like a teacher. Maths or maybe History, but this is DC and also those hours. In the end you decide: NSA. Probably a data analyst, or maybe a linguist, actually. He looks like he’d smell of libraries if you were to get close enough. Something about the way he carries himself makes you think: not politics. Not unless the candidate was a childhood friend who tricked him into it somehow. He does have that air of having been betrayed by the world in some way.

You never introduce yourself, and neither does he, just acknowledge each other’s existence with a nod and a non-committal grimace. Not a smile, not really.

Not too long after Simon’s question, the guy is suddenly on crutches, hobbling around noisily in his apartment, the clank-clank of them as he comes up and down the stairs. You don’t ask him what happened, assume he injured himself playing basketball or something, there are so many corporate leagues in this city, accountants living out their fantasies of playing in the NBA down at the Y. And he's just so fucking tall, in a way that makes him look like a teenager who still hasn't come to terms with the latest growth spurt. It all makes perfect sense in your mind and you don’t waste any more brain space thinking about it.

You hold the door open for him a few times, wait in the doorway for him to make his way across the lobby or the sidewalk, your eyes on your phone like you meant to stop there so he doesn’t feel like he has to rush. 

He nods his thanks, but still doesn’t look at you. Honestly, he’s basically the perfect neighbour, you couldn’t possibly ask for more. 

When the crutches get replaced by a cane things get less noisy next door and you go back to ignoring him when you see him.

Then one night, you order Chinese food and the delivery guy brings you pasta. It smells good, sure, and you’ve heard nice things about the place whose logo is on the receipt you didn’t check until it was too late, but you’ve been craving a stir-fry with extra prawns since lunch got downgraded to a stale bagel with cream cheese and a snack pack of carrots that was past its sell by date eaten in a smelly car with tinted windows and washed down with a lukewarm rootbeer.

You open your door, hoping you can catch the guy before he speeds off, but you’re still stepping into your sneakers, your door half-open, when a second delivery guy shows up. He smiles like he knows you, holds up a white plastic bag for you to see. 

You smile back, relieved that at least you have your own food now, but not really sure what to do with the styrofoam thing of Italian food that’s sitting on the table in your hallway. You’re about to pay the guy when the door next to yours opens and your neighbour peeks out. 

“Sorry,” he says, and you realise it’s the first time you’ve ever heard his voice. “I thought it might’ve been my food.”

“Did you order from Manzini’s?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have your food. Hang on.” You wave off the delivery driver to indicate that he should keep the change and he smiles wider like you’re definitely friends now and then he jogs back down the stairs. 

That transaction completed, you reach into your hallway and grab the bag of food that was clearly intended for your neighbour, and then walk the few steps from your door to his. “There you go. I think the guy just picked the wrong door. I didn’t realise until after he left.”

Your neighbour looks at the bag you’re holding out, then at you, like he’s trying to decide if this is a trick. You shrug and shake the bag a little, indicating that he should take it.

You’ve been in your apartment nearly six months and it occurs to you, you haven’t actually ever seen his teeth before. Your mom is a dentist, your whole life teeth have been the first thing you saw. Not in your neighbour, though, he is all gangly limbs and doe eyes that never meet yours exactly. 

“You paid for this?”

“Yeah. I thought it was my food.” He still hasn’t moved. “I didn’t open it or anything.”

He takes the bag from you. “I should pay you,” he says, like he’s explaining some social convention.

You wave him off. “Maybe next time, you get my food.” Then your curiosity gets the better of you. This is how cats die, but it’ll shock the hell out of Simon and that’s its own kind of motivation. “Or, if you’ve got a bottle of wine…”

You trail off, assuming your meaning is clear, but he just stares at you. “I don’t.” He shakes his head, like puzzle pieces are falling into place in his mind in real time. “But I can buy one for you.”

You smile because clearly he’s working on a completely different puzzle. “That’s okay. I have wine.”

“Oh. I thought you meant to compensate you for paying for my food if you’re uncomfortable accepting cash.” He frowns, it looks like he’s recalibrating, probably trying to work out what you expect in exchange for his food.

“No, I meant we could share the wine, maybe eat together?” You only realise how it must sound after the words have left your mouth, the unintended desperation built into spelling it out. You’re not the type to proposition anyone, so it never occurred to you that that might be what you were doing. You do just fine sitting at bars and letting them come to you, or maybe very occasionally letting married friends from long ago or colleagues set you up, so long as everyone is clear that you aren’t girlfriend material.

“I don’t have wine,” he says again, but this time it sounds more like an apology. “I do have lemonade. And soda.”

You nod. “Right. I’m gonna go grab a bottle of wine from my fridge and be right back, okay?” You hold out the bag containing your food and he takes it, less hesitation this time. When you come back 20 seconds later with a bottle of white wine, he’s still standing exactly where you left him.

“My name’s Spencer, by the way,” he says, and it sounds like he’s been practicing the line while you were gone.

You smile and tell him your name. The one on the lease you didn’t sign yourself.

“I know,” he says. “It was on a parcel that was delivered once, it sat on your doorstep for 3 days.”

He doesn’t say it like he’s complaining, it’s just a fact. It was also two weeks after you moved in. Your dad sent you a microwave so you wouldn’t starve but you were out of town. It was a nice gesture and you love the thing, but maybe you understand why your parents are divorced.

Spencer closes the door behind you but doesn’t lock it. You’re used to hearing the clicks and clangs of both the locks on his door whenever he comes or goes, and you realise leaving it open is for your benefit, so you don’t feel trapped.

You eat on his couch, he brings plates for you both from the kitchen, two sodas and a single wine glass, this antique-looking crystal thing that immediately makes you think you’re definitely going to drop it.

“I don’t really drink.”

Ah. “Do you want me to take this away?”

He shakes his head quickly. “Nono, that’s fine. I just don’t drink very often. Only if… I have to?”

“When would you ever have to?”

He smiles, this expression that looks sort of like his whole face is shrugging. “I just mean only on special occasions. Not that this isn’t…” He trails off, looking embarrassed.

You snort with laughter. “That’s fine. I only ever drink when it’s not a special occasion.”

He frowns, trying to work out if you’re joking but then apparently gives up. You get the feeling this is a thing he’s used to.

“So I have to know,” you say, putting your empty plate on the coffee table 20 minutes later and deciding that you’ve waited long enough. He seems as uninterested in small-talk as you are, so why not just move on? After all, it doesn’t seem like he has any more facts about shellfish allergies or the unfair reputation that MSG has and how it got it. “What do you do? Your working hours are worse than mine.”

He shrugs, clearly deciding how to respond. You hope he doesn’t say private security or corporate consultancy. You can not live next to another CIA agent. You are sick to death of moving and you actually kind of love this place by now, it does feel like a home. Also: would Simon have ever allowed that? “I’m a behavioural analyst. For the FBI.”

FBI analyst. That’s probably fine. It sounds pretty office-based. “Like a profiler?”

He nods. 

“Do you have a gun?” You’re joking, and this time he gets it.

“Not on me.”

“Good.”

You’re not sure who leaned in first, but the kiss is a pleasant surprise. He’s eager but in an undemanding way, at least to begin with. When you scrape your teeth against his bottom lip, not an actual bite, just the suggestion of one, he makes a restrained sound deep in his throat and then his hands are on you, holding your head in place as he deepens the kiss, his tongue against yours as he presses you backwards into the couch.

Then suddenly, without warning, he pulls back. Hands still on your face, his breath ragged. “You had two glasses of wine.”

“Um.” That is a fact, definitely.

“Are you accustomed to drinking alcohol? If you aren’t, you probably don’t have great tolerance and two glasses is more than enough to impair your judgement. If that’s the case, we shouldn’t be doing this.”

Oh. You smile, a hand on his cheek. “I’m not drunk.”

“Are you sure?”

“Very sure.” You’re buzzed, yeah, but not drunk by any means. Your judgement is very much unimpaired. At worst, it’s slightly blurred around the edges, but he is dead centre. Those eyes are quite something when they’re aimed straight at you.

“Okay. Good.” He smiles, just a quick twitch of his lips, pulled up on one side, but it reaches both his eyes, and then he kisses you again, no more hesitation. 

Somehow, you’re straddling him, his hands snaking their way under your t-shirt to rub up your sides and back, directly on your skin as he pushes the t-shirt up your body before pulling it off you, and then another pleasant surprise when your hips grind against him, already hard. Based on that initial impression, this has the potential to be a lot of fun if he knows what to do with it.

He moans into your mouth, and then he pulls back, again, his hands gripping your hips to hold you in place, at a distance. This is starting to feel like a bad habit he needs to get rid of and you frown, opening your mouth to tell him so. 

But he beats you to it, nibbling on your chin before he says, “My bedroom is just through there.”

Relieved, you kiss your way along his jaw, and then you get up. “Lead the way.”

He does, taking your hand almost shyly.

Your first thought as you land on his bed is how strange it is that his sheets smell of detergent, so clean as if he expected company because in your experience that’s the main reason men change their linen; your second thought is how soft his hands are against your legs as he pulls off your jeans and panties. Your third thought evaporates when he spreads your legs open and kisses his way into you, one hand on your thigh, the other on your stomach. 

When your orgasm washes over you, he seems surprised, looks at you in amazement as if he can’t quite believe he did that, and something about his expression makes your core clench as you pull him up your body so you can kiss him, tasting yourself on his lips. 

He kisses you back, hovering above you and careful not to put his weight on you. “Was that… okay?” 

You almost laugh, but then you realise he isn’t asking for an ego boost, he’s genuinely wondering if he did a good enough job. “Well, I definitely enjoyed it,” you tell him, running your hands through his hair as a prelude to pulling him down for another kiss.

“Me, too,” he says, pleased.

Jesus Christ. It’s his tone as much as the look on his face that makes you realise: He hasn’t done that before. You pity the women before you, they clearly missed out. The guy is a natural. “Good. Feel free to do it again anytime.”

His eyes go wide. “Now?”

This time, you do laugh. “No,” you say, reaching between you so you can undo his belt buckle. “How about now we do something else?”

It takes just a fraction of a second, your words being processed in his brain, the openness of the statement, but then it links up with the way you’re undressing him and he nods against your forehead.

His hands shake slightly as he tears the condom wrapper, but once he gets it open, it seems like he knows what he’s doing. You’re a little relieved that you’re probably not about to deflower your neighbour. Not that you’d mind, but maybe you would have played this differently. Slower. 

He works your body like you’re an experiment he’s doing, observing your reactions to his touch, his rhythm, the angle of him thrusting into you. Any positive reaction gets a repeat action to confirm. Part of you wishes he’d just let go, another part is too busy enjoying what he’s doing to care about the why. He can deal with his own shit, it’s none of your business. All you need to know is it feels good. And he’s a very quick study.

Your second orgasm is less of a surprise to him, he knows the signs now after all, but the effect of it, the way you clench around him, and maybe the way you sigh with pleasure right in his ear, push him over the edge, and that seems like it surprises him. 

He moans as he comes, tries to muffle the sound by biting your shoulder. Does it hard enough that his teeth leave marks that will still be there tomorrow. When he realises what he did, he’s mortified, those soft, soft fingers gently brushing over your skin, as if he can erase the marks.

You want to make a joke about dental records and ask if his employer has his, but he looks so guilty you aren’t sure he’d be able to handle it. Instead, you grab his hand and bite down on his wrist. Not hard enough to make a mark, but hard enough to make a point. “There, now we’re even.”

“I’m really sorry,” he says for maybe the seventh time, but finally sounding less like he’s going to spend a week beating himself up about it.

“Don’t be. It was worth it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Double sure,” you joke.

That almost gets a laugh out of him. “Noted.”

Which fully gets a laugh out of you. “Are you writing a dissertation or something?”

“I actually have three PhD’s.” He’s not bragging. Well, maybe a little, you decide when you catch the hint of smugness in his smile.

“Any of them in female orgasms?”

“No. Chemistry, Mathematics, and Engineering.”

Okay, then. You realise you probably know as much about your neighbour as you could reasonably want to, and the information came with a very pleasant added bonus, but now it’s time for you to leave. 

This is more than enough pillow talk and if you stay in his bed any longer, you might get too comfortable in it. 

Except then he kisses your shoulder, wrapping an arm around you as he molds his body to fit against yours, and you realise that it’s too late, you already are.

You give yourself five minutes and then you definitely need to go.

Seven minutes later your phone beeps to signal an incoming text, then a few minutes later another and then a third. 

“Do you need to get that?” His hand stills on your skin, his fingers halfway through a loop around your belly button. There’s a tension building in your core and between your legs, your body just about ready to be triple sure, but happy to wait and see if it’s something he’ll initiate or not.

“No, they'll call if it's urgent.”

The words are barely out of your mouth before your phone rings. 

Spencer smiles like he knew that would happen. 

You sigh, shifting on the bed until you can lean over the edge and pull your cell phone from the pocket of your jeans. He grips you around the waist to stop you from toppling out of bed.

“Yes?” you say into the phone, smiling apologetically at Spencer and mouthing “Work.”

He just nods, watches as you get out of bed and start getting dressed, still with the phone to your ear, your responses as brief as you can get away with. 

At the other end of the line, Simon laughs. “You’re not alone, are you?”

“No.” You sigh.

“Neighbour?”

What the fuck? “Yes.”

“Unexpected. I’m impressed.”

“Okay,” you agree, because you can’t really shoot back right now.

When you can’t find your bra, Spencer digs it out from behind a stack of books, and then he pulls on his boxers and goes to the living room to find your t-shirt, brings it to you no longer inside out, holds it up to help you put it on while Simon is still droning on in your ear.

You hang up and shrug. “Sorry, I’ve gotta go.”

“Of course,” he says, easy, because calls like that are completely normal for him. Very convenient, actually. “Can we… Can we do this again?” He looks uncertain but hopeful. 

“Yeah,” you say, then realise with a start how much you want to and immediately backpedal. “Sure, I guess. Sometime.”

His face doesn't fall, exactly, just settles. “Sure,” he repeats.

* * *

You don’t see him again until a month later; you’re coming home after three days of practically living at the office, someone somewhere critical sending emails using all the right words and everyone losing their minds until it becomes clear that sometimes a kid’s birthday party is just a kid’s birthday party, even if you’re on a watchlist; he’s clearly leaving, duffel bag in one hand, keys still in the other as he comes jogging down the stairs.

He stops mid-step, one foot hovering in the air, and you smile. “Hey.”

“Hey.” His voice is soft, not unfriendly, not distant. Hesitant, like he’s not sure what to expect.

“Going out of town?” You point at his bag.

“Yeah,” he nods. “Denver. We’ve got a case.”

You almost say “Cool,” but then stop yourself. It doesn’t feel like an appropriate response to someone with his job telling you they have a case. “Well, maybe I’ll see you when you get back,” you tell him instead.

His eyebrows shoot up and then fall back into place. “Yeah. Yes. Okay.”

You realise from his response that he mistook your ‘maybe we’ll run into each other on the stairs again’ to mean something different. But he doesn’t seem put off by the idea despite the way you left before so you just smile. You might even be looking forward to it, listening to the silence coming from his apartment for the next few days, hoping for noise.

When he does come home, you hear him unlock his door as you’re reheating your dinner, then shortly after that the rustling of the pipes as he showers, and less than 10 minutes later there’s a knock at your door.

He hasn’t brought takeout, or wine, but he looks like maybe he wishes he was carrying something. You just smile and wave him inside. 

“I wasn’t sure if it was too late,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “But then I heard your microwave.”

“Leftovers,” you tell him. “I just got home an hour ago.”

You realise he’s staring at your lips and it makes you smile, which makes him stare even more intently. Because you’re kind of an ass sometimes, and because you want to see what he’ll do, you lick your lips.

He swallows, his pupils dilating. His hands stay in his pockets.

“This way,” you tell him and walk ahead of him into your bedroom.

* * *

It becomes a kind of routine after that, a pattern that feels more familiar than it probably should. It’s not a regular thing, both your lives are too full of work for regular, but in your mind that’s for the best. Irregularity keeps things casual. Low pressure, low demands.

You don’t discuss what it is you’re doing at all, you don’t need to, it’s all perfectly simple. You’re neighbours who occasionally fuck. It’s easy, convenient. It’s fun, mostly. It’s cathartic, sometimes. It’s a pleasure, always.

You’ve been taught never to bring your work home with you. There’s the obvious ‘no paperwork leaves the building,’ or sometimes even the room, but also the emotional part of it. You leave it at the office and then you go home and live your life.

Except, it doesn’t really work that way. You compartmentalise well, but no boxes are airtight.

You think Spencer has probably been taught the same, but struggles in the same way, too. Possibly more, his face is basically an emotional cinema if you look properly. 

The same way he spent that first night learning your body - and boy is that a lesson he remembers - you’re learning each other’s moods as well. 

None of you have ever said “I had a bad day at work,” or “A case turned out better than expected, let’s celebrate.” That’s what the knock on the door is for. Or sometimes, you’re both just bored and at home. But you both learn to understand, learn how to tell whether the sex is going to be light and easy or one of you is chasing away demons.

It takes you a little longer, but then reading people is his actual job. He doesn’t tell you any more about that, just the way you don’t tell him about what you do. You don’t know the names of his colleagues, who he gets along with, who he’d rather be rid of, and he doesn’t know anything about yours.

Actually, you never told him what you do, exactly, and he never asked. He probably assumes he knows, and that’s fine by you. You don’t need him to know anything about you other than how to find your clit and your g-spot and he has both of those down. 

He never questions what you’re doing, never pushes for more, so you assume he feels the same way about the arrangement.

It’s not as if he doesn’t ask for things, otherwise, so you figure if he wasn’t happy with how things are, he’d tell you.

He doesn’t suggest anything outrageous, no niche fetishes for you to wrap your head around, decide whether or not you can get on board with. Nothing that makes you consider calling it quits on the whole thing.

It’s more that he’s learning what you both like, the whole thing still an experiment and maybe he lied about that PhD. You’re happy to be his research project.

* * *

“Can I try something?” he asks, settling with his head between your legs, his hands caressing your thighs. He really wasn’t lying when he said he enjoyed that and you are not complaining. “I read this article that said—”

“Go for it,” you say, cutting him off before he gets himself distracted with a long-winded explanation of what he read. It’s not that you don’t enjoy his little lectures - not a teacher, but still, you weren’t exactly wrong - you just don’t really have the patience for it when his tongue is this close to your clit.

He laughs at that, huffs of warm air against your exposed skin. “Show, don’t tell, huh?”

“Yes, please,” you agree, then actually whine with pleasure when he does.

“So, success?” he asks, wiping your juices off his chin as he sits up a while later. You have no idea how much later; time is a construct and he tore it down with whatever he was doing with his tongue and his lips and his hands.

“Smug bastard.” You’re still catching your breath, your vision still slightly blurry, but you can see the look on his face clearly enough. 

He laughs. “That was just very effective. Quite surprising.”

You can’t really disagree with that. “I think I need a moment,” you tell him, rolling over to lay against him, pressing a kiss to his sternum.

“We’ve got all night,” he says. You do, it’s true. Somehow the planets aligned and you came home within half an hour of each other after several days away and it’s as close to guaranteed as it’s possible to get that no-one will demand either of your presence anywhere until tomorrow morning.

But you never really take all night; the closest you get is if one of you falls asleep and then wakes up with a start a couple of hours later, dressing in the dark and sneaking out as quietly as possible. You’ve never seen the sunrise through each other’s windows.

You actually think he might have timed how long you’ll stay in his bed for, how long you’ll let him stay in yours before you start to get restless, and now he’s on the same schedule. Or maybe he just learned that you don’t expect him to hang around all night. At the beginning, you were always the one to get up first, but he never once asked you to stay longer, and now he’s just as likely to get out of bed and move on first as you are, his nose in a book before you get all your clothes back on.

You don’t call him on what he said, you don’t question it, it’s just an expression. Instead, you run your hand slowly down his abdomen until your fingers reach the patch of hair, knuckles brushing lightly against his erection. “All night, huh?”

His breath hitches at the touch. “Yeah,” he says, then launches into a lecture on how the refractory period changes with age, how he might be nearing the end of his peak statistically, but there are several external factors that affect performance.

You don’t get to hear about those, the flood of words interrupted by a moan followed by a string of whined expletives when you circle his tip with your tongue and then take him in your mouth. You’ve been reading stuff, too, and if you’ve got all night, you might as well test some of it out.

So long as ‘all night’ means the hookup lasts that long, not that you’re moving in, you’re fine with it.

* * *

You get passed over for, not a promotion, exactly. It’s a lateral move, really, but it’s one you wanted to make. Simon pushed as much as he could, you know he’s not the one who got in the way of you moving on but the rejection still rankles.

It’s been close to a year since you invited yourself to eat your takeaway in Spencer’s apartment. You haven’t had a meal together since, not counting the occasional mid-coital recharge which is usually just snacks and water - with electrolytes because Spencer wanted to know if that would improve recovery time and you like the taste so you kept drinking it. 

The new job would have meant relocating, actually going back to New York the way you wanted. A long way to travel for a booty call even if the sex is that good. 

Also, you’d no longer be neighbours, which is pretty much the whole premise. Proximity is the only reason this is working.

The plan is an early night and drowning your frustrations in a bottle of tequila, but then you hear the sound of upbeat jazz from next door. It’s been a whole week of silence, much longer than that since you’ve seen him and not just heard him through the wall. Part of you had started to wonder if something happened. 

You screw the lid back on the bottle of Patrón and shove it back in the cabinet that stores your liquor. 

You’re cleaning your teeth when there’s a familiar knock on your door. You spit and rinse, quickly brush your hair, and then you go to open the door.

He’s in sweats and a t-shirt, which isn’t a look you get to see very often, usually you’re the one who’s more casually dressed. One of your favourite things to do is pull off his tie, the way he watches you so closely as you undo the knot, but there are advantages to this outfit as well. Like how quick it is to get out of. “Hey,” he smiles. Whatever he was doing while he was away, clearly it went well. 

“Hey.”

His smile falters just slightly at whatever he sees on your face, but then he tilts his head, assessing you. Decides your clipped tone and stiff smile aren’t about him. It’s a pretty neat trick. “You want me to go?”

“No. I was gonna come to you.” You pull open the door completely to let him in.

He brushes the hair out of your face, kisses your forehead, and you close your eyes just for a moment. 

You hadn’t planned on going to him to ask for sweet or tender, what you really wanted was a workout and he’s closer than the gym, but his hands are rubbing your arms in a way that is so comforting you realise that you can have both, if that’s what you want. What a bizarre thing, both to want and to have available. How unlike you in every way.

You turn your head, stretch, and kiss his hand. Lead him to your bedroom.

You do want both, and you stand still so he can undress you at whatever pace he decides is right. 

He works slowly, carefully unbuttoning your shirt and kissing your skin as more and more of it is exposed. 

“Is this new?” he asks, fingers running along your shoulders, lifting up each bra strap.

“Yeah.” It was an impulse buy, meant to be a lucky bra, because for just a moment you forgot you don’t actually believe in luck or fate. Things happen because they happen. The colour of your underwear doesn’t change anything.

“It’s nice,” he says, then unhooks it, pulls it down your arms, and throws it unceremoniously on the floor as he leans down to kiss your shoulder where the strap has left an indentation on your skin.

You smile. Six months ago, he would have folded it up neatly and put it on a chair, or maybe let you take it off yourself so you could treat it however you saw fit, but he’s easier now, looser. More comfortable, both in his own skin and in your space.

He’s still Spencer, though, the same guy who studies you and learns you so thoroughly, who can talk forever about things it never occurred to you that you might want to know, but somehow you almost always do, especially after he learned that your attention span is longer when you’re either fully clothed or post-orgasm. The same guy whose eyes sometimes go wide with surprise when you pounce on him, kiss him or touch him before he has a chance to prepare for it, this look on his face like he can’t quite believe what’s happening or how he got here. But he isn’t leaving.

He bends slightly to let you pull his t-shirt over his head and then you walk him backwards into your bed. He sits down without objection, spreading his legs so you can step between them, and then he presses his lips to your abdomen, hands wrapping around you to keep you in place as he kisses your skin.

As if you have anywhere else to be.

When he finally decides it’s time to unbutton your jeans and pull them off, you’re practically squirming with wanting and breathe a sigh of relief when he pulls your panties down along with the denim. He chuckles, planting a soft kiss on your hip bone. 

“Tease,” you object.

His hands skate up your thighs, knuckles brushing against your skin. “I’m just enjoying myself.”

What the fuck are you meant to say to that?

“Me, too.”

He smiles against your skin, a hand pushing between your thighs and up, two fingers separating your folds as you spread your legs slightly to give him more space. You’re soaking wet already. “I can tell.”

You hiss at his touch, hips pushing towards him hoping for more. He really can be a jerk sometimes, but not in a way you mind. “Please.” You’ve said please to him more than to almost any other person. Unlike most other people, he has never not given you what you needed.

He pulls back slightly so he can look up at you, no doubt calculating the probability of you throwing a fit if he keeps teasing you. Then, holding your gaze, he shifts his hand and pushes two fingers inside you, barely moving as he just lets you fuck his hand, his eyes never leaving yours.

You moan with relief and pleasure, your hands on his shoulders to keep yourself upright as your orgasm builds. When you grip him tighter, he twists his hand, his fingers hitting a new spot inside you and his thumb rubbing your clit. “Fuck, Spencer,” you sigh, your knees buckling and your eyes closing as the orgasm hits you.

“So pretty,” he says, his fingers still inside you as you pulsate around them, but his lips back on your skin, his other hand around your waist to help keep you mostly upright.

You push him back on the bed and then down so you can straddle him, his fingers replaced by the feeling of his erection through his sweatpants. The way his dick pushes against the fabric, you realise he isn’t wearing boxers. 

If he came over dressed for a quick fuck, then what the hell is this? As well as he reads you, he must have known that’s what you were looking for when you opened the door to him.

He looks up at you, warm hands moving slowly up your back, and then he pulls you down for a kiss, slow and thorough. 

You pull away so you can kiss a trail down his abdomen, your hand pushing under the waistband of his sweats and confirming your suspicion about his wardrobe choices. 

“Wait,” he says, a hand on your neck stilling your movement. Turning down a blowjob? That’s a first. “I want to feel you.”

Okay, then. You scrape your teeth along his oblique muscle and then lift your head, grinning. “What a coincidence."

He smiles, reaching for the drawer of your bedside table as you pull down his sweatpants and then you watch as he pulls open the condom wrapper with his teeth and then rolls it on, his eyes on your face again. He’s watching you so closely you know it should make you uncomfortable, but instead you just wonder what he’s seeing and how it can possibly not make him look away.

You straddle him and he lines himself up so you can slowly sit down on him, his hips tense with the effort not to push up into you too soon.

When you finally settle against him, he sighs with relief, his hands landing on your hips. 

You set a slow pace, because that’s what he’s been doing, and he throws his head back against the mattress, moaning softly with pleasure, his hips thrusting up to match your rhythm. You look at him, just enjoying the view of him enjoying you, until he senses you watching and opens his eyes to look back.

He bends one leg at the knee, pushing you forward and changing the angle of your movement, and you bend down so you can kiss him, holding yourself up with a hand against the mattress on either side of his head. His hands move from your hips to your hair, combing through it gently to keep it out of your face.

“You feel so good,” he tells you and the words make your inner muscles clench around him.

This is new. You don’t normally talk during sex, unless it’s a warning about an impending orgasm or an expression of pleasure, or maybe an instruction. Or very occasionally Spencer deciding that now is the perfect time to explain some anatomical detail or point out the location and meaning of chakras because he just read a book about Pranic healing and he wants you to know about it too. 

You don’t do dirty talk and you don’t do sweet talk, partly because it’s so easy to accidentally say something you’ll regret or don’t really mean.

But apparently tonight Spencer does compliments and you’re more into it than you probably should be, not sure what it says about you or what you’ll be expecting in the future.

You kiss him again, then sigh when one of his hands moves from your hair to your breast, teases your nipple with just the right amount of pressure to make you moan into his mouth.

“So perfect,” he says, tilting your head slightly so he can kiss your throat, pressing his lips to where your jugular vein is pulsing with enough force that it’s like he’s kissing your heartbeat.

You actually whine with pleasure, the circular motion of your hips becoming erratic, and he moves his hands back to your hips, steadying you as you ride him and your orgasm builds. It’s almost a relief when it finally comes, the way it makes the whole world disappear and all you hear is Spencer’s moans in your ear as he thrusts frantically up into you, his own release coming only a few seconds after yours.

When you’re able to lift your head again, you find his lips with yours, kissing him lazily, and he kisses you back, smiling against your lips.

You finally roll off him a few minutes later so he can get rid of the condom and then he settles against you, lips on your shoulder and an arm slung over your midsection. 

You realise more than an hour has gone by, and you haven’t thought about work once. You had expected sex with Spencer to help you get rid of some frustrations and burn some energy, maybe serve as a momentary distraction, but instead, you’re relaxed and too spent to really care about the injustice of it that had you steaming earlier.

“I was going to go to New York,” you tell him, surprising yourself with the revelation. “New job.”

He stops kissing your shoulder just long enough to ask, “But you’re not going?”

“No. They gave it to someone else.” You don’t say that ‘someone else’ is a shithead, he’s not up for the job, is good at looking good but not very good at doing the actual work. It doesn’t matter, and there’s too much else you’d have to explain that also doesn’t matter.

“So you’re staying?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He shifts, gets up on his elbow and kisses his way into your mouth, doesn’t pull away until you feel dizzy.

The lightheadedness is probably why it doesn’t occur to you to remind him it’s time to leave, and why you sleep through the night with his arm wrapped tightly around you, wake up to the sunlight hitting your face, his breath warm against your neck, his morning wood nestled against your thighs, and an alarm clock you forgot to set.

You’re half an hour late to the office, but honestly, fuck them all. 

* * *

Work gets a bit crazy after that. On the one hand, you’re bitter about not getting the job you wanted, on the other hand you’re determined to prove that you were the right choice and they’re going to regret it.

Simon knows exactly what’s fuelling you and lets you get on with it. The closest he comes to commenting on your newfound zeal is asking if you aren’t happy you stayed, as if it’s a choice you made. DC has its upsides after all, and it’d be a shame if you had to leave your nice apartment. When you look at him blankly, he rolls his eyes and spouts some shit about the Rose Garden and the Monument. How the view is nicer here.

You both know what he actually means: one time when you had to stay away longer than expected, he was the one to water your plants. He hung around long enough to clean out your fridge, which was mostly him eating your food, and to answer the door when Spencer knocked, thinking you were home.

Simon had been nothing but polite, actually told the truth about why he was there, said nothing at all about who he was, truthful or otherwise. Smirked his way through the debrief three days later, a pat on your back and a whispered warning about what you might come home to as you both left the room. As close to saying “I met your boyfriend,” as he could get without actually saying it, saving you from telling him “Not my boyfriend.” Preventing you from asking: “What do you think?”

You waited for a month for Spencer to say something about how he found a man not old enough to be your father in your apartment while you were out of town, but he never did, until one day he met you on the stairs as you were leaving with your suitcase in one hand and he asked, oh so casually, if you wanted him to water your plants while you were gone.

When you told him no, he just nodded, and that was that.

* * *

You sigh, making no effort at all to camouflage the noise as something else. Maybe the mic on your phone will even make it sound louder on the other end? “I don’t know what to tell you, Claire, but the answer’s no.”

“Why, though?” Claire is nothing if not persistent. It’s basically her job to be, never take no for an answer. But right now you really wish she had an off switch and knew how to find it herself.

“Because I don’t want to?” You nudge off your stilettoes and push them haphazardly into the pile of shoes in the bottom of your wardrobe. Out of sight, out of mind. Other than the obvious, the shoes are your least favourite thing about your job, definitely what you hate most about being in the office.

“Why, though?”

You bang your head against the doorframe. This conversation has been going on in bursts for nearly a month and your patience is wearing thin. “Because I don’t want to.”

There’s a knock on your front door and you bite your lip. There’s no way to end this phone call in less time than it’ll take Spencer to decide you’re not up for seeing him tonight and either go home or go out to wherever he goes when he leaves. And you are up for seeing him, more and more the longer Claire goes on.

“Look, Claire, there’s someone at the door, I have to go.” It’s a desperate attempt, and a foolish one. About a million ways for it to go wrong, maybe two ways for it to work. They both involve some sort of disaster happening on Claire’s end of the phone call. Maybe Spencer can tell you the odds of an extremely localised hurricane happening in Maryland in this one particular cul-de-sac.

“Did you order food? I can wait.”

Jeeeeeesus. “No.” 

“Check the peephole, maybe it’s a burglar.”

You do check. “It’s not a burglar.” You pull open the door and gesture apologetically to the phone you’ve got trapped between your shoulder and your ear. Spencer nods and quietly pushes off his chucks before he makes his way to your living room.

“So who is it then?”

“My neighbour.” 

“What does he want?”

He wants you to stop talking, you don’t say. He came here so we could fuck, you also don’t say. “He wants to borrow some milk.”

Spencer smirks and picks up the book on your coffee table, leafing through it.

You go to the kitchen and open the fridge, getting out the bottle of milk. You pour a glass for him, because Claire can smell a rat and also a lie. 

“Are you sure he just wants milk? How old is he?”

“I’m not sure. Probably pretty old, he has like three PhD’s.” You sense Spencer’s presence in the doorway but don’t turn to look at him. There’s no way you’d be able to keep your laughter down if you caught his eye.

“Hmm,” Claire sounds unconvinced.

“Look,” you say, ready to end this conversation. “It’s nice of you to think of me, but I’m just not interested in dating right now. I’m trying to focus on work.”

You feel Spencer’s hands on your waist, pulling your shirt from the skirt you still haven’t had time to change out of. His hands on your stomach are warm as they move up to cup your breasts through your bra and you nearly sigh with pleasure.

He’s close enough now that you know he can hear Claire’s part of the conversation as well. “Since when can’t you do both? Is this about New York?” Spencer’s right hand moves back down your body, bunching up your skirt as he presses himself into you from behind, his erection growing against your lower back. “You’ll get another shot.”

You tilt your head back and to the side, an invitation for Spencer to kiss your throat. He does, scraping his teeth along the spot below your ear that makes you feral. His right hand pushes into your panties, a finger circling your clit and then dipping lower.

Fuck.

You clear your throat to disguise a moan and you hear him snort with suppressed laughter against your skin.

“I know I will, but your newly divorced brother won’t, okay. At least not with me.” 

“But…” Claire starts to object before you cut her off.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.” You hang up the phone and throw it on the counter. “There’s your milk,” you say, pointing at the glass before you have to grip the edge of the counter with both hands when he adds a second finger, pumping into you and hitting exactly the right spot. It’s one that no-one else has ever been able to find and it never fails to make you lose your mind.

“Thanks,” he says, managing to sound a lot more casual than you know he feels, the way his hips are grinding against you in a jagged rhythm. You love the way getting you off gets him off - and how it works exactly the same the other way around, too. “But I’m actually lactose-intolerant.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” you say, ending on a moan when the angle of his hand changes as you move to push your panties and tights down your legs so you can step out of both. 

“Don’t be,” he says, his breath ragged. He pulls his fingers out of you and you whine in frustration, but then decide it’s for a worthy cause when you feel the fabric of his slacks shift and then slide against your ass, then his skin directly on yours, his dick rubbing against your wetness. “I honestly couldn’t care less right now.”

It takes you a moment to remember that you’re having a conversation about milk. “Still,” you pant. “Ice cream on a summer day, whipped cream on warm pie. Hot chocolate.”

“No,” Spencer insists, moving behind you as he rolls on the condom he just pulled from his wallet. Then he bends you over the counter and lines himself up, pushing into you from behind. Your feet barely touch the ground, you are being held up by him impaling you. “Still prefer this.”

So do you. It’s not even a real contest.

You’re so close to the edge already, he barely needs to brush against your clit again before you’re falling apart around him.

You moan with pleasure and he slows down his thrusts as you pulse around him, giving you a moment to recover, pushing your hair to one side so he can kiss your neck, nibbling gently at your skin.

“Someone’s trying to set you up on a date?”

“Mhmm,” you say, still drunk on your orgasm. “She’s been hounding me for weeks.”

He runs a hand through your hair. “Weeks?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty stubborn.” You reach a hand behind you, finding his ass and pushing him closer to you, needing more than he’s giving. 

“Clearly so are you, if you’re still telling her no.” He thrusts into you twice more, harder than before, and then pulls out. Before you can object, he turns you around and lifts you up on the counter, positioning you so he can push back into you.

You sigh with a mixture of relief and pleasure, leaning your head back against the cupboard behind your head. “I guess.”

He smiles and leans in to kiss you, your moans mingling as he picks up the rhythm again and you feel another orgasm building. 

He senses the change in you and smiles against your lips. “I am, too.”

His hips stutter desperately against you and you can see the vein in his forehead working overtime, but he has your shirt open, your bra pushed aside so he can get his lips on your nipple, a finger circling you clit, making sure your second orgasm is washing over you before he lets go with a moan, his head dropping to your shoulder.

You press a kiss to his temple. “I like your stubbornness better than hers.”

* * *

You come home one night, close to 2 in the morning, to find Spencer sitting on your doormat, back against your door.

It’s been more than a year and a half of this arrangement and this is not a thing you do, waiting for each other so obviously.

When you get closer you see his eyes, swollen and red-rimmed, the wet stains on his shirt where his tears have landed.

You kneel in front of him, a hand on his cheek, wiping at where his tears have finally stopped running, the skin still red and raw. His hands are fisted in his lap.

“My friend died,” he says, voice hoarse and shaky.

Shit. Okay. “I’m sorry.” He leans into your touch and you let him, cupping his cheek. “Do you want to come inside?”

He nods, so you get up and hold out your hand to help him stand up. He doesn’t take it, just reaches up to give you what he was holding. You look at what landed in your palm and it’s a small vial of dilaudid. 

“Oh, Spencer, honey.” You grip the vial tightly and hold out your other hand. This time he gets to his feet.

He follows you like a robot and you get him settled on your couch before you go to the kitchen and make chamomile tea. While the kettle is boiling you check the state of your fridge, sniff a box of leftovers and bin them, then search the cabinets until you find a pack of unexpired cookies. It’ll just have to do.

The vial of dilaudid is burning a hole in your countertop and you pick it up, go to the bathroom and pour it down the toilet. Then you rinse the vial and throw it in the trash, wrapped in toilet paper so no-one will have to look at it.

In the living room, Spencer hasn’t moved since you left him. You set down the two mugs of tea and the box of cookies on the coffee table and sit down next to him.

“Dilaudid?” You don’t really want to know, but you can’t just ignore it. That feels like a very dark grey zone, morally. Neighbours with benefits, sure, but you’re also both human beings outside of the arrangement you have. And there’s no denying that you like him as a person, that you… care about him, or whatever version of that you’re capable of.

“I’ve been clean for almost four years,” he says, staring at his hands.

“That’s amazing.” It’s also a revelation and maybe it explains a few things you hadn’t been looking to have explained.

“Is it?”

“Yeah.” You put a hand on his knee. You’ve never touched before without it being at least partly sexual and the gesture feels sort of performative. You aren’t friends. He doesn’t flinch or remove your hand, though. “That’s a lot of days to make the right choice.”

He looks at you. “You got rid of it?”

You nod and he nods back.

“Thanks.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

He looks at you for a long moment, and you get that. This isn’t what you do, the two of you. Talk about your lives in so much detail. But then he does, tells you the whole sad story that ends with his friend (a colleague, but there’s no real line between the two categories for him, you can tell by the way he talks about her) lying dead in a hospital. Gives you far too many details about arms dealers in secret prisons and Interpol, and you try so, so hard to let those bits float in one ear and out the other so you don’t feel tempted to go and look things up. By the time he’s done, you’re holding his head as it rests against your shoulder, your hands smoothing down his hair. 

You kiss the top of his head, hugging him. There’s nothing you can say to fix this, so you don’t say anything at all. 

He pulls back, eventually, his eyes still red, wet again and you have no doubt there’s a stain on your shirt. 

“Sorry,” he says, his eyes on your shoulder. 

“Your mascara not waterproof?” you ask, dismissing the apology.

He smiles a watery smile. Then he kisses you. Just presses his lips to yours at first, but then his hand goes behind your head and his teeth bite gently into your lower lip, pulling at it lightly. You recognise this move for what it is: A final warning, last chance to slow this down, to turn this down.

You lean back on the couch, shifting until you can lie with your head on the armrest, your hands behind his neck so you can pull him down with you.

He follows you easily, his weight heavy against you from your thighs to your chest, his tongue working your mouth with purpose while he presses his hip bone into your crotch, fingers tweaking your nipple through your clothes, all the shortcuts he knows to getting you worked up as quickly as possible.

Most of the time, you’re the one to go for fast. If Spencer’s in a hurry, it’s to get back to reading or whatever he does when he’s at home - you assume it’s mostly reading based on the number of books he’s got everywhere and how there are always different ones scattered about the apartment - but he’ll come over because he can’t focus on Archimedes or the history of agriculture in Central America until he’s had his tongue inside you, and you’ve thought before that maybe making you come recharges him. 

But tonight he’s in a rush to get to something else, and you think you might be more aware of what it is than he is himself. He’s not the first person in the world to try to fuck the grief away and he won’t be the last. 

You know it won’t work, not really, but you’re not going to be the one to try to stop him because that’s not going to help anything either. You move your legs, spreading them as far as your skirt will let you, one leg pressed against the back of the couch, the other wrapping itself around his thigh. Then you squeeze a hand between your bodies, into his slacks and then his boxers, wrapping your fingers around his hardening dick.

“Is this what you need?” you whisper in his ear. 

He thrusts into your fist with a groan. “Yes. Please.” He sounds desperate in a way that isn’t about the sex at all and you feel your heart break for him a little.

Your mind runs through the logistics quickly, how to get rid of your clothes, protection, the fact that you’re on the couch and not in your bedroom: a cramped space and no bedside drawer. The fact that Spencer doesn’t have the mental capacity to consider any of these things right now. If you make any sudden or unexpected movements, you think he might fall apart. 

Playing for time, you continue to stroke him, and you’re starting to think you could probably get him off like that pretty quickly, but then he raises himself up and pushes up your skirt, running a hand up the thigh not wrapped around him, pushing your leg up until it’s bent completely and your knee is against your chest. His hand runs back down your thigh and he cups your mound through your clothes, rubbing you roughly with the heel of his hand.

Oblivious to the tights you’re wearing, he tries to get his fingers into your panties, but instead of giving up in frustration as you might have expected, he pulls the 20 deniers away from your body and pierces the nylon with his fingers, tearing the tights apart completely along your crotch.

Barrier destroyed, he nudges your panties aside and has a finger rubbing your clit before you really grasp what just happened. “Fuuuuuuuck,” you hiss, your free hand falling to the side and landing on the floor where your fingers grasp at the carpet for something to steady yourself with.

Rooting around, your hand brushes against something firm but silky and you realise it’s your clutch purse. The one that goes with all your outfits, so it’s the one you bring on every night out. The one with your pepper spray, small pack of test strips to check for date rape drugs, and a travel toothbrush in it. And a condom. There’s also a condom, you’re pretty sure. You have no idea how long the purse has been under your sofa, and by extension how long the condom has, but it seems too serendipitous to question it. Or it would do, if you believed in that kind of thing.

You manage to snap open the purse and quickly locate the condom in the small side pocket, pull it out and raise your hand so you can show Spencer your prize. He looks at it for a few seconds, not quite understanding, but then he nods and takes it from you, making you whine in frustration when his fingers stop doing what they were doing. You pull your hand out of his boxers and unbutton his slacks, pushing them both down just far enough to release his dick at the same time as he opens the condom packet and gets it ready to roll on. 

Your panties have fallen back into place enough that they’re in the way and he pulls them to the side again and then pushes inside you slowly, only partway at first, before he pulls back and then pushes back in a little further. With every push, you moan, and with every moan you feel him throb inside you. 

Desperate for more, you wrap your leg more firmly around him, bending it until your heel is pressing into the back of his thigh. He gets the message and thrusts all the way in at last. At this angle he gets in so deep that it’s almost but not quite painful in the most exquisite way. “Yes,” you tell him, then repeat it when he thrusts again, and then his lips are on you, kissing you deeply and frantically, your moans mingling in the shared air you’re both breathing as he fucks you with a desperation you can almost taste, harder than he ever has before.

You had really expected this to be entirely about giving Spencer what he needs, but you feel your own orgasm building with an intensity that makes you feel slightly desperate too and you shift a little, adjusting your body so he hits your clit with his pelvic bone when he bottoms out. 

You grab at him, arms around his back, trying to push him even closer to you, mewling with pleasure and then the whole world goes white, all conscious thought leaves you, and all there is is the feeling of Spencer pumping into you harder and harder against the contractions of your orgasm until he spends himself inside you and collapses on top of you.

You lie like this for several minutes, both of your breathing slowly returning to normal, and then you brush away the hair that’s sticking to his forehead, drops of sweat still running down it. 

Cupping his cheek, you lift up your head and kiss him. He kisses you back, then presses his forehead to yours, his lashes fluttering.

“Spencer, sweetie. Let’s go to bed, okay?”

He stays where he is for so long, you’re not sure your words really registered, but then he moves off you slowly, never quite breaking contact with your body, a hand on your arm, your abdomen, your leg the whole time. 

You take his hand, intertwining your fingers with his, kissing each of his knuckles, and then you get up and lead him to the bedroom. 

He sits on the edge of your bed, moving the hand he’s holding to his shoulder, like he’s scared of what will happen if you stop touching. You squeeze his shoulder to let him know you understand, you aren’t going anywhere, and he finally starts undressing slowly and then cleaning himself up. 

You help him get his t-shirt off, on your knees behind him, your thighs against his back maintaining body contact. When he has undressed completely, he lies down of his own accord and crawls under your duvet, naked, one hand still on you. Then he lies there, watching you undress without a word, moving his hand only as much as he needs to for you to be able to remove your clothes.

You almost leave your panties on, but then he nudges them down your hips one-handed, and you take them off. When you get under the duvet with him, he pulls you into his front, spooning you so you’re touching from your heels to the back of your head, skin against skin. One arm goes under your neck, the other is wrapped around you tightly, holding you in place. 

You turn your head so you can kiss the arm under you near the crook of his elbow. 

“I’m right here,” you tell him. “Try to get some sleep, okay.”

He squeezes your body in response, but he doesn’t do as you told him, at least not in the hour you manage to stay awake yourself, listening to the sound of his breathing never really settling.

When you wake up the next morning, the events of last night slowly coming back to you, he’s awake too, and you wonder if he slept at all. You know the moment he’s sure you’re no longer sleeping, because the hand that has been drawing circles on your stomach starts moving more deliberately, dipping down to brush against the patch of hair and then up, knuckles skating along the underside of your breasts.

His erection is pressed into your thighs and you press yourself back towards him, reaching behind you to put a hand on his hip.

He kisses your shoulderblade, then turns you around so you’re face to face and his lips find yours, his arms wrapped around you and holding you close. You expect him to touch you with the same urgency as last night, but instead he is soft and tender, slow. His hands on your skin, his lips on your mouth, one of your legs wrapped around his as you lie on your sides and he thrusts into you languidly.

“I…” he starts, then stops himself. His lips tilt in a sad smile and he brushes your cheek. “Thank you.”

“Always,” you say, an automatic response that leaves your mouth before your brain can process it. It’s not always, it was never going to be always. But maybe for right now it’s okay to pretend? At least you can’t bring yourself to take it back.

The way he looks at you, you’re pretty sure he doesn’t believe you anyway.

* * *

For several months after this visit, if he’s not away on a case, he’ll come knocking once or twice a week long after you’ve gone to sleep, his eyes on the floor, and you’ll invite him in without a word, let him trail behind you as you get back into bed.

Sometimes, he’ll push a hand into your pajama bottoms, working you with deft fingers until you come with a moan, then he’ll wipe his hand on the cotton, wrap his arm around you and you’ll fall asleep again too soon to know if he gets any sleep himself.

Mostly, though, he’ll just lie there, holding you close like you’re the thing that stops him floating away.

He’s always gone by the time you wake up in the morning.

You hear him leave his apartment sometimes, in the evenings, and you find yourself wondering where he’s going. NA meeting? Grief counselling? Another woman?

He’s rarely back before you go to sleep and you don’t wait up for him, but you hear him moving around his kitchen the next morning so wherever he went, he didn’t stay the night. Not that that means anything, and it’s not any of your business either way.

Other than the wordless nights, things mostly stay the same as they were, neither of you acknowledging those visits, completely separate from what else you do together.

Spencer smiles less, maybe, heavier somehow, which is probably the weight he put on his own shoulders for the friend he couldn’t save. 

If you’re honest, the intensity hasn’t been bad for the sex at all, if anything it’s like he wants you more now, wants to pleasure you more, but you still miss the way things were before, how carefree he could sometimes make himself be. 

It should probably bother you, or at the very least make you start planning an exit strategy, but the days just seem to go on and you don’t really get around to it.

You’ll get out when the sex is no longer worth it, you tell yourself. When you stop looking forward to seeing him.

The fact that you look forward to seeing him more than you look forward to the sex is one that you never, ever acknowledge. That you miss him in bed with you when he stops visiting you in the night, no longer needing whatever it was he got from that.

You tell yourself you’ll know when it’s time to get out.

* * *

Then seven months later you return after a few weeks away, and his door is opening while you’re still turning the key in the lock. His hands are fists and you can feel the anger radiating off him even from four feet away. This is not like anything you’ve seen before, frustration at a case that didn’t go how he wanted, the injustice of whatever system got in the way. 

This is personal. This is the kind of anger that in most people shouldn’t be allowed near weapons, you think.

He doesn’t say a word, just follows you inside, then closes the door behind himself, leaning against it as he pulls you to him, his hands on your face. Caught up in the sense of urgency, you shrug off your jacket and step out of your shoes at the same time, losing a few inches of height and he has to lean down further to make eye contact.

Even through the haze of whatever’s on his mind, there’s a question in his eyes. He still wants your approval, your understanding.

You can’t think of a single thing he’d ever do to you that you won’t agree to, so you stand up on tip-toes and kiss him.

He growls into your mouth, the way he kisses you back more like a bite than a caress. His hands fumble with the buttons of your shirt until you realise why he’s struggling and you still his hands so you can show him, pulling open the top snap button concealed by the placket: the buttons he has been trying to undo are nothing more than decoration. He blinks, then tears the shirt open in one go and you decide you’ll be wearing this particular outfit more often, the hungry way he stares at you in an open shirt and bra.

Nothing turns you on more than seeing him want you, seeing him struggle to stay in control of himself, and you could probably sustain yourself on those moments when he loses that control for the rest of your life.

You keep your eyes on him, wait for his gaze to meet yours, and then you unbutton your slacks, pull them down along with your panties and step out of both.

His eyes are locked on yours but you see him swallow, see the way his eyes glaze over as his brain fills in the blanks of what he isn’t looking at. He sounds out of breath although he hasn’t moved at all since he closed the door.

You lick your lips and his stare strays to them, then comes back to your eyes. 

“I’m gonna—” he says, then shakes his head at himself.

“I’m really hoping you will,” you reply, biting your lip, anticipation building inside you.

He shuts his eyes tightly, as if when he opens them again, he’ll be somewhere else, someone else. But he’s not.

He grabs you, spins you both around so you’re the one with your back against the door and then he kneels in front of you, nuzzling his nose in your lower belly, his hands moving up your thighs, and then he raises your left leg and puts it over his shoulder, forcing you to put some of your weight on him and trusting him to keep you upright.

Then he buries his face in you, humming appreciatively against your sensitive flesh before he licks up your folds. You run your fingers through his hair, then grab it tightly when his tongue circles your clit before he sucks on it gently.

He takes you to the brink of orgasm and then pulls back, making you whine in frustration. When he looks up at you there’s a glint in his eyes, something you’d probably describe as wicked if this hadn’t been Spencer.

“I’m so close,” you tell him, just in case he’s somehow misreading your signals for the first time ever, but he just turns his head and kisses the inside of your thigh wetly, waiting for you to come down off the high slightly. Then, when he decides you’ve waited long enough, he starts again, working you with his tongue and his fingers until your breath is shallow and your moans start to become desperate.

And then he pulls back. Again.

“Spencer…” you plead, but he just smiles against your skin, hands caressing your thighs completely at odds with the torture he’s subjecting you to.

The fourth time he does it, you bring your own fingers to your clit but he shakes his head and pulls it away. “Not yet.”

“Please.”

“Not yet,” he repeats, insistent, his voice low and distant as if he’s completely lost in what he’s doing. 

He spreads your folds and - without warning - sucks on your clit, hard. Your hips buck and you scream with pleasure, nearly falling, but his hands on your thighs and your hands in his hair keep you upright. Then he nudges your leg back off his shoulder, gently setting it back down on the floor before he stands up, and for a moment you think he’s just going to leave, but then you breathe a sigh of relief when he unbuttons his slacks and pushes them down and steps out of them, along with his boxers. Finally!

His dick is hard, red and swollen and wet with precum, and you take some pleasure in the fact that this game he’s been playing has been just a little painful for him, too.

He pulls a condom from nowhere and you vaguely remember him once telling you he did magic, except you thought he meant as a kid, and it was just a joke about how skilled he is with his hands. 

Maybe later you’ll comment on it, but for now you’re too busy willing him to just get the thing on already, before you actually lose your mind, and then he’s lifting you up and you wrap your legs around him as he presses you against the door and buries himself inside you completely in one smooth motion.

You sigh with relief and pleasure, wrapping your arms around his neck, your forehead resting against his.

He moves in and out of you slowly, setting a pace that does nothing to scratch the itch he has been causing and then ignoring. You clench your muscles around him and he groans, but doesn’t change what he’s doing.

You’re trapped, completely at his mercy, and it would turn you on if you weren’t already too turned on. “Please, Spencer,” you beg again. “I need—” 

He shuts you up with a kiss and a slight twist of his hips as he pushes into you, offering you a fraction of the relief you want. 

You feel your orgasm building again and try your hardest to conceal it from him, maybe you can trick him into making you come if he doesn’t realise it’s about to happen, but no. Your body betrays you and he knows you much too well, knows exactly when to stop, just shy of crossing the point of no return.

You groan with frustration and he shakes his head at you then starts again, slowly, when he decides you’re ready for it. 

By the third time you’re so frustrated you’re actually getting angry and you grab his face in both hands, making him look at you so he’ll know you’re serious. “Enough. Either you make me come or you get the fuck out.” As angry as he was when he walked through your door, it doesn’t even occur to you to be scared to tell him to leave.

It’s like this is a secret password he’s been waiting to hear, and he suddenly starts pounding into you, your body slamming against the door every time he bottoms out. 

Every time it happens you moan with the relief of getting what you need at last. The orgasm that finally rolls over you is unlike anything you’ve felt before, the way it goes on and on and on as if somehow your body has compressed all those orgasms you weren’t allowed into one massive never-ending wave of pure pleasure.

You don’t even realise he’s carrying you to your bedroom, your arms and legs still wrapped around him so loosely you’re nothing but dead weight in his arms, and then you’re lying on the mattress with him still fucking you, each thrust sending a new burst of pleasure through you until he moans, long and low as he comes and then collapses on top of you.

“Okay, then,” you say, when the concept of language finally returns to you.

He kisses you sloppily, not quite hitting your lips, and then rolls off you and on to his back with an exhausted sigh.

You turn, cuddling into him.

“They lied.” His tone is flat, his eyes on the ceiling of your bedroom.

You draw a spiral starting at his solar plexus with your middle finger.

“She didn’t die.”

You freeze, your hand crashlanding on his chest, and you push yourself up so you can look at him. “What?”

“She didn’t die. She just left. She went into hiding and they lied to me.” 

You blow out a gust of air. “That’s pretty messed up.” It is. It’s not unheard of in your line of work, but the way he’s been since, surely they were close enough for him to be on a safe list. It makes you very relieved you resisted the temptation to look into what had happened. You would have found all that out, and you’re not sure you trust yourself to have kept your mouth shut about it.

“I can’t even really be happy she isn’t dead, because I’m just mad.”

“You’re happy,” you tell him, because this is something you’re sure of. “Underneath the anger. You just feel betrayed right now. It’ll flip back around eventually.”

He pulls you half on top of him, his hands on your face guiding you to him so he can kiss you properly. “So you’re a profiler now?”

“No,” you say, because that’s really not a job you want. It seems much too touchy-feely. “I just know you.”

He doesn’t react at all, doesn’t flinch or pull away, no momentary shock or surprise fluttering across his face, so you try not to freeze either. You don’t know him. The whole deal here is that you don’t know each other, not enough to make characterisations like that. That’s why this works.

You think maybe he does notice your own reaction to your words, though, the way you want to get up and leave, because he pulls you closer, kissing the side of your face. “I guess you do,” he agrees, like it’s fine. “I’m still mad, though.”

“That’s allowed.” 

“You should hope so,” he says, not sounding mad at all, his voice tinged with amusement.

“That’s very different,” you tell him. “You were just being rude.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

You stroke his hair and you think you might get it, actually. Not a profiler, but you do know this man, however reluctantly. “You just wanted to be in control.”

He looks at you, surprised, because you’ve never acknowledged the fact that people have motives for anything before, never given him any reason to think you understand how human beings work, emotionally. “And you got mad.”

“I did,” you agree. “But I got over it. It turns out it was worth it.”

He grins at that and you just know he’s making a mental note of this insight that you’ll live to regret. And hopefully not regret.

* * *

You walk into the bar ahead of Simon, because he knows if he let you walk in last you’d make a run for it. You don’t want to be here, you want to be at home. Or next door to home.

Instead, you’ve been bullied into going out for a birthday celebration of all things. Drunk colleagues you will have to take seriously the next time you see them. How could anyone have ever decided this was a good idea, as a concept in general?

You look around the bar, less crowded than you had hoped for, which makes it harder for you to disappear in the throng of people and then disappear all the way out of there.

And then, across the room, sitting in a booth with a group of people and his hands around a club soda, is your neighbour.

Shit.

You want to leave even worse now, desperate to get out of there before he spots you. What if this is his regular hangout and he thinks you followed him here? 

This is so not what you guys are about.

He looks up from the conversation he’s having with an older guy who looks slightly familiar although you can’t place him. His eyes register surprise when he spots you, and then he clearly catches what you’re sure is a look of dismay on your face, a slight smile and a shake of his head, like it’s hilarious to him that you’re worried.

He looks away, gesturing with a hand you can’t quite tear your eyes away from as he talks, those fingers waving around when you know what else they can do. It hits you why the older man looks familiar. You’ve seen his face on the dust jacket of a book you leafed through but didn’t buy a couple of months ago, because you realised Spencer would know if you started educating yourself on what his job is actually like.

Okay, then. 

He goes out for drinks with the guy who literally wrote the book on his job, and now he’s completely comfortable ignoring you in a bar.

You smile, relieved, and accept the glass of white wine you’re handed.

At least now you know that being at home tonight wouldn’t be more fun than what you’re actually doing. 

You’re leaning against the bar, ordering a mineral water with lime an hour later, when you sense someone coming up to stand next to you.

You don’t even have to look to know it’s Spencer, the shape and smell and energy of him too familiar to mistake. He orders another club soda and the bartender walks off to make both your orders at the same time, which means you’re stuck here waiting with him. 

"You shouldn't go home with that guy." His tone is casual, conversational, like you're discussing the weather. Which you might as well be, you guess.

You turn your head to look at the suit who just spent the best part of an hour trying to chat you up. "Oh? Why not?"

"He's selfish in bed."  He says it with such certainty it makes you laugh, too loudly for people not to notice. When you look at him out of the corner of your eye, he's smiling at the counter and you want to lick the smugness right off his face.

"And how do you know that?" You smile at the bartender as he returns with your drinks and don’t protest when Spencer hands him his credit card, indicating that he’ll be paying for both.

"I'm a profiler, it's my job to know that."

“Your job is rating people’s fuckability? And here I was thinking you caught murderers and things. No wonder crime rates are up.”

“Actually, the most recent statistics show that several…”

You turn and put a hand on his chest, shutting him up. “I’m sure that’s very interesting, sir, but I’m going to go back to my friends now.”

Just to mess with him, you wipe condensation off your glass with your index finger and then lick it off.

He stares at you and you can see his throat working, but he doesn’t say anything else. You can’t really tell if he regrets talking to you at all or he wants to pin you to the bar, but you realise you’d quite like him to do the latter, so you turn away quickly and walk off.

You go back and talk to the guy some more, trying to see what Spencer sees, or maybe to decide if he's just pulling your chain.

You never had any intention of sleeping with the man, you probably wouldn’t have done it even if you hadn’t been sleeping with Spencer. Not that you have any kind of exclusivity clause, you’re both free to sleep with whoever you want, you just don’t particularly want to sleep with anyone else, because why would you put in the work to have worse sex than what’s available right next door? And the statistical probability of anyone else doing a better job getting you off than Spencer, is one you don’t really need him to calculate for you.

This guy would always have been boring, and that would have been enough to put you off, but now that you’re watching for it, you see what Spencer meant. The guy touches you, keeps putting his hand on your arm, but always to pull you closer to him, never just to touch you, he never just lets his hand settle. 

Whatever he talks about, almost all his sentences have the words ‘I’ or ‘me’ in them. He never just tells you a story, or a fact, unless it’s related to himself in some way.

You find your attention drifting to the table across the room where Spencer is sitting with his friends or colleagues or whatever they are. You assume colleagues, probably his team, just because you don’t really see him being part of a group like that if some external force hadn’t put them together. You wonder if the one who died but didn’t is among them. You have no idea how she looks, just know that her name is Emily.

The way they were joshing him when he returned to their table after you left him standing at the bar, one guy actually knuckling him in the shoulder as he laughed, was almost enough to make you walk over there, pull him up by the tie and kiss him until they all shut up. But then a blonde woman put her arm around him, pulling him into her side as she whispered something in his ear and you couldn’t look away from how he smiled at her words, shy but clearly pleased. 

Then he had looked up and caught your eye, and the way his brows furrowed as he took in your expression made you tense and look away at last.

Whatever he saw, you hope he didn’t misinterpret it as jealousy.

The blonde has left by now. You couldn’t help but watch her as she walked past and she actually looked at you and smiled, friendly and maybe mildly apologetic. You have no idea what for.

Spencer is talking to the other blonde in the group, clearly explaining something about her very pink drink to her in great detail. Possibly he’s giving her a list of additives that have gone into making it that colour. But who cares about additives when the cocktail perfectly matches her dress? Also, you’ve caught him glancing at you several times, like he’s paying attention to you as well. 

Whatever’s going on between Spencer and the pretty blonde who went home early, that’s really between the two of them and not something you need to worry about.

You turn away from Suit Guy, who’s telling you another ‘me’ story, and slowly start unfolding your coat under the table so you can put it on. You see Spencer noticing, and you don’t miss the shift in his shoulders, like his body is preparing to move, but he stays seated, only stretches slightly to get a look at Suit Guy, who is still talking, completely oblivious to the fact that you’re about to walk away.

Spencer’s lip twitches and you bite down on a smile.

Then you get up, say a firm goodbye to your colleagues, a congratulatory birthday peck on Simon’s cheek, and then you head out before Suit Guy catches up with what’s happening and before Claire can decide that the two of you should share a cab since you’re both going in vaguely the same direction.

Outside the bar, you take a deep breath and throw your head back so you can look at the sky. It’s cloudy, no stars out, but you can see the blurry outline of the crescent moon.

You flag down a cab, part of you wanting to wait a couple of minutes longer, but another part of you worrying it’ll be the wrong guy who follows you out. 

The suggestion that there’s a right guy worries you even more.

You’re in the backseat of the cab, your hand reaching out to close the door, when you spot a familiar shape in the doorway to the bar, taking a few long steps into the darkness and looking around, clearly searching for something.

You hold up your other hand to the cab driver and leave the door open until Spencer spots you.

The way he smiles when he does makes your toes curl with anticipation. He looks behind him to make sure no-one is watching, and then he walks quickly to you and gets in the backseat as you slide over to make space for him.

The cab driver looks bored in the rearview mirror as he asks for an address. You tell him where to go while Spencer pulls the door closed and then turns to look at you, clicking his seatbelt into place.

“So I was right?”

You roll your eyes. “Obviously.”

He grins at that, reaching out a hand to fiddle with the collar of your coat, his fingers brushing against your skin as he folds it up and then back down more neatly. You did kind of rush to put it on and get out of there.

His eyes are almost entirely black, his pupils so dilated you can barely see his irises, and you can see his jaw working. But he doesn’t do anything else, just keeps toying with your collar.

“Did you have a good night?” you ask, because you desperately need to get some kind of a conversation going to distract yourself from the temptation to just straddle him right here in the taxi, never mind whatever cleanup fees you’d incur.

“Mmm,” he says, non-committal, slipping another finger under your collar and playing with the hair at your nape, his index finger drawing a circular pattern on your neck. “I tried to hit on a woman at the bar but she completely shot me down.”

“Oh, no. I feel so bad for you.”

“Thanks.” He shifts his hand, pushing under your dress behind your neck until he reaches the strap of your bra. He runs a finger over the lace, examining the pattern of the embroidery. “Green?”

You snort, reluctantly impressed. “Lucky guess.”

He leans closer. You think he might actually kiss you and you stop breathing. But he stops just short of making contact, his breath hot on your earlobe, his lips close enough to tickle the peach fuss hair. “Definitely lucky,” he whispers.

Your thighs clench together, you’re starting to feel desperate. You put a hand on his knee, then slowly run it up his thigh, your fingers drawing along the inseam of his trousers out of view of the cab driver, or at least you fucking hope so.

Spencer hisses in your ear when your hand stops less than half an inch from his crotch. Then he takes your hand with his free one and pushes it back down his leg.

“Please don’t.” He sounds so desperate you can’t bring yourself to laugh.

You turn your head so you can whisper in his ear. “Then you’d better make it worth it.”

“Always,” he says, not so much confidence as just stating an irrefutable fact, and you don’t argue.

It doesn’t seem fair that he won’t allow you to touch him, when he’s not taking his hands off you at all as you make your way steadily from the bar to home, but it’s not as if you want him to stop and you’re sure that would be the compromise he’d offer, so you don’t argue about that, either. Just tilt your head this way and that as he continues to trace patterns on your neck, his breath still warm and heavy against your skin, his lips still not quite on you.

You aren’t sure who he’s torturing more, you or himself.

There’s no way the cab driver spends the 20 minute drive oblivious to the foreplay you have going on. Spencer must realise this too, because he has his wallet out in no time and tips the guy more than generously when he pulls up in front of your building. 

“Have a good night,” the driver shouts before driving off, probably with a pretty clear idea of what kind of a night you’ll be having. You’d mind but you’re too busy hoping he’s right.

Spencer waits on the sidewalk for the cab to disappear around the corner at the end of the street, and then he pounces on you, practically wrapping himself around you, his mouth warm and wet as he kisses you so fiercely you would have stumbled backwards if he hadn’t been holding you that tightly.

Your back hits the glass door of your building so hard Spencer actually pulls back to check that nothing broke. You first, his hands suddenly gentle against the back of your head, and then the door, quick confirmation that the pane isn’t cracked, and then he pushes the door open and brings you inside. 

You stumble walking backwards up the stairs, but again his grip keeps you upright, your lips never apart for more than a fraction of a second until you’re pressed against the wall between your two front doors.

He pushes a leg between yours, his thigh pressing into your heat, offering just a little bit of the relief you need.

"Your place or mine?" you ask, because the joke is too obvious not to make.

He braids his fingers with yours, pulling both your arms over your head, and then bites down gently on your neck, lips nibbling until he finds a spot he likes, and then he sucks a mark on your skin. One that’ll still be there tomorrow. "Mine."

Then he digs into his pocket for his keys, pulling you with him so he can keep kissing you while he unlocks the door and then maneuvers you both inside.

“You can’t do that again,” he tells you, pushing you against the door as he closes it and then activates both locks, his lips and teeth on your throat.

“Do what?”

“Just turn up—” he reaches behind you and unzips your dress. “—out there in the world.”

“I know,” you say, although it doesn’t sound like he’s actually all that upset about it. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

He pulls the dress down your shoulders, leaving it hanging off your hips, and then turns his attention to your green bra. “It’s extremely disorienting.”

“I’m sorry.”

He leans down, puts his face between your breasts, his hands on the cups to push them together, and then he breathes in deeply. “Don’t be.”

You are sorry, because it has thrown you off as well, but you’re also not that sorry, because Spencer’s hyperfocus on your body seems to have reached a whole new level tonight, and you’re pretty sure it’s all thanks to the fact that he’s been watching you from across a bar for a couple of hours.

“...Could think about was throwing you down on that table and finally tasting you.”

You realise that he’s talking, but you’re not sure he’s talking to you and not just himself, all his attention still on your breasts and your green not-so-lucky lucky bra. Which might be just a little lucky after all.

“You probably wouldn’t be allowed back if you did that,” you joke.

“Probably not,” he agrees, unbothered, slowly sliding the straps of the bra down your shoulders, kissing a trail behind it on one arm.

You lean your head back against the hardwood door, enjoying the feeling of his lips on you. 

“So why were you there?” He kisses along your collarbone and then down your other shoulder.

“Work thing. My boss’ birthday.” Simon looks so different in his office clothes, also the beard has vanished since the last time Spencer saw him, you’re pretty sure he didn’t notice it was the same man tucked into the darkest corner of your booth.

He trails his lips along your skin, pressing kisses to the soft flesh of your breasts as he reaches behind you to unhook your bra. “And did you have a good time?”

“I’ve had better.” Your breath hitches when he carefully pulls your bra down and then latches on to your breast with his mouth, teasing your already hardening nipple into a peak with his tongue. “This really boring guy tried to chat me up.”

He pauses, looks up at you with his brows furrowed, and then moves to your other breast, paying it the same careful attention.

“Luckily this nice guy at the bar warned me about him.”

You feel his smile against your skin. “He sounds great.”

“Meh,” you say dismissively. “He wasn’t all that.”

He snorts with amusement and actually bites you, making you shriek, part surprise, part laughter.

“I mean, he was cute and all, but it was clear he was there with friends. He was probably just chatting me up as a dare.”

There’s a wet sound as Spencer’s mouth leaves your skin. It feels cold and you miss his touch immediately. He stands up and looks at you. “They caught me staring at you and told me I should go introduce myself.”

He’s the one who sounds apologetic now. You’re not sure if it’s for the staring or his coworkers.

You smile, tilting your head up, and he kisses you, his lips caressing yours and his hand on your cheek. “And then I shot you down. Sorry,” you say when he pulls back.

“That’s fine.” He kisses behind your ear, his breath warm in your hair. “I believe they all expected that to happen.”

“They don’t know you’ve got game?”

He pulls back once again. “Game?”

He looks so confused, you snort with laughter. 

He grimaces self-deprecatingly, his face landing in a smile. “Oh. I think it’s pretty obvious I don’t have ‘game’.” He says the word like it’s in a foreign language he hasn’t quite mastered the sounds of.

You take his right hand and push it under the smooth fabric of your dress and into your panties. He moans softly when his fingers reach the wetness that’s already pooling there. “Not to me,” you tell him.

He pushes his hand down further, fingers separating your folds and coming back up to rub against your clit. “This isn’t game.”

You moan, your eyes fluttering closed. “No? What is it then?”

He pulls out his hand and you whimper, open your eyes to look at him. He brings the same hand to his mouth and licks his fingers. “It’s you.”

Fuck, if his words don’t turn you on even more than you already are. And fuck if that isn’t a problem.

“Bed. Now,” you say, pushing him backwards into his apartment.

He huffs in surprise but then walks backwards willingly until he gets to his bedroom. Once there, he reaches for you, pulling you in for another kiss. 

You reach for the buttons of his sweater vest but then grab it by the hem and start to pull it up and off because you realise that’ll be faster. He lets out a disgruntled sound when it means he has to release you, both with his hands and his lips, but you’re all about the greater good here and continue on your mission.

His tie is crooked and the knot looks messy, like he’s been toying with it, or maybe pulling at it. You reach up to loosen the half windsor, a smile on your lips. You turn up the collar of his shirt and then instead of pulling out the knot, you pull the tie up and over his head, once again interrupting him.

Before he can get his lips back on you, you put the tie on yourself, leaving it loose around your neck.

He pulls back to look at you, fingers wrapping around the tie and smoothing it down your body, knuckles brushing against your breasts and your belly and finally your pussy, where he pauses, pressing more firmly against you and you breathe deeply, starting to feel desperate with lust. He watches your breasts rise and fall, the tie between them.

“I never really liked this tie.” He kisses you again, reaches up to cup your breasts. “But I think it just became my favourite.”

Unbuttoning his shirt is a task you can’t really cheat your way out of, other than by making Spencer do it himself, and that would mean he’d have to stop touching you, so you get to work on the buttons while his hands roam your skin and his lips kiss your cheek, you neck, your shoulder.

“You know what’s cool?” you say, humming when he bites down gently on your earlobe. 

“No, what?” he whispers in your ear.

“Velcro.”

“Velcro is actually a brand name that has become synonymous with a product type,” he says. “It’s a deonym. The manufacturer would prefer that you call it hook-and-loop fastener instead.”

“I don’t care what you call it, I just know it’s easier to open than these buttons.”

He nuzzles your neck, you think maybe he’s shaking his head at you, and then lets go of your breasts so he can help with the buttons.

“Nooooot what I meant,” you say, putting his hands back where they were, even if they are sort of in the way of your own work. 

“This is not very efficient,” he points out, his thumbs drawing identical patterns over your nipples.

“Velcro would be efficient.”

“Yes, well I didn’t exactly dress for this kind of efficiency when I went to work this morning,” he says mildly.

“You always dress like this,” you remind him, only two buttons left.

He just hums in agreement, then gets in the way by leaning down to kiss your breast, teasing the nipple with his teeth and then soothing with his tongue.

Finally you undo the last button and push the shirt off his shoulders so he can shrug out of it. He lets go of you briefly, but his lips stay firmly locked on your neck.

This leaves him in his t-shirt and slacks.

“Like a goddamn gag gift,” you complain.

His hands brush down your sides until they reach your dress, bunched up where it’s hanging off your hips. He reaches behind you and quickly finds the zipper to undo it the rest of the way, and then shimmies the dress down until it falls off you and onto the floor.

“See?” you say. “That’s how easy it could be.”

“I’m not sure I could pull off wearing that dress,” he says, keeping his hands on your hips as he pulls back slightly to look at you. 

You’re wearing nothing but his tie, your panties and a pair of sheer stockings, and his eyes travel up and down your body like he’s not quite sure where they should land.

You grin. Unlike Spencer, who dressed for work, you definitely dressed for coming to see him after your night out.

He shakes his head slowly, a smile on his lips that you’re pretty sure isn’t actually for you. Then he grabs his t-shirt by the neck and pulls it off in one smooth motion and has his belt unbuckled and his slacks unzipped before the t-shirt hits the floor. 

Then he grabs a hold of his tie and pulls you with him as he steps back until his knees hit the bed and he sits down before leaning back until he’s lying on the bed with his feet on the floor, and you have to crawl on top of him or you’ll fall as he continues to pull you in.

You straddle him, rubbing yourself against his erection as you bend down to kiss him. 

When you try to push yourself up, he grips the tie more firmly and keeps you in place, pulling you back down until you kiss him again.

“You know, this is very convenient,” he says, tugging lightly on the tie.

“Oh, yeah?” You smile and shift until your breasts are lined up with his face. He takes the hint and turns his head slightly so he can suckle on one of them, his tongue drawing some indiscernible pattern he has clearly figured out that you enjoy. You hum. “Just remember you wear one of these almost every day and I’ve never used that against you.”

“I will definitely be remembering that,” he assures you as he moves from one breast to the other.

You’re rubbing yourself against his stomach, no doubt leaving a trail of arousal on his skin as it seeps through your panties. The way his dick presses against you from behind when you move down, his erection flat against his stomach, makes you both moan.

Eventually the friction becomes too much, while also not being enough, and you move off him, his grip on his tie loosening as your breasts move out of reach of his mouth. You stand up and then bend to pull off his boxers and he raises his hips off the bed to help you. Then he sits up and slowly peels your soaked panties off. 

He hooks a finger into each of your stockings, considering, and you wait to see what he’ll do. He hums deep in his throat, shakes his head. Then he tugs on the elastic, pulling you forward as he lays back down. You move to straddle him but he shakes his head again, continuing to pull at your thighs until you realise what he wants.

You crawl up his body, over his arms and then you’re sitting on his face, his breath warm against your folds. He hooks his arms around your legs, thumbs tucked into your stockings as your thighs press against his ears.

When he moves his head just a little, lips puckering to suck on your clit, you nearly topple over and his moan is interrupted when you all but smother him.

“Sorry,” you say, and he shakes his head as much as he’s able to, trapped between your legs.

“Mm-mm,” he hums against you and then gets back to work, his lips and his tongue working against your sensitive skin. You moan, fighting your instinct to move your hips, the desperate need to writhe against him. 

You need something to cling to, something to keep you balanced so you don’t fall, and somewhere through the haze of arousal and pleasure, you can’t stop the thought that you need it for more than one reason from forming, taking up shape in your mind while you’re too preoccupied to keep it out. There are so many ways you can fall. You reach for his hands on your thighs, meshing your fingers with his.

Your moans turn into whines as your orgasm approaches, and you can’t stop your hips from rutting against him. He grips your thighs tighter to hold you in place, his palms pressing into you while his fingers are still entwined with yours, his tongue pushing into you and fucking you through your orgasm.

You collapse on the bed, just sufficiently aware of your surroundings to not knee him in the face when you move off of him. He looks so completely pussy drunk, you’re not sure he’d actually have even noticed, though.

He laughs a little, just a small chuckle as he turns his head to look at you, hooking his fingers back into your tights and pulling them down your legs one at a time.  

While he pulls the last one off your foot, you twist so you can reach the box of condoms on his bedside table and take one out. He’s still preoccupied by your stockings, running them through his hands, so you pull open the packet and position yourself so you can roll the condom on him. Before you do, you look at him and find him watching you intently, the stockings discarded and his gaze burning into you until you have to look away, and you pretend that the task of rolling a condom down his dick is a lot more complicated, and requires a lot more of your focus, than it actually does.

He waits patiently for you to finish, but then reaches for your hands, pulling you down by both of them until he can kiss you while you move to straddle him.

“You,” he says when you pull away, and you wonder what’s coming next, but he just smiles, nothing else to say. You snort, force yourself to just be amused, and shake your head at him.

“No, I mean it,” he insists.

You don’t want to know what it is he means, pretty sure you can’t afford to, so you roll your eyes indulgently at him like it’s so funny and the intensity of it doesn’t make you want to run away. “Sure you do.”

He reaches for the tie and you assume he’s going to pull you back down, start moving before he even has a grip on it, but instead, he gently pulls it over your head and throws it on the floor, one hand combing through your hair. 

You lean down the rest of the way and kiss him anyway, your tongue in his mouth as you position yourself above him and then you sit up so you can take him in completely, let him stretch you to what feels like your breaking point at first, but then you adjust, the way you always do. The way he fits.

He sits up, loosely gripping your hips to slow down the pace of them as they twist to pull away and then come back, wrapping his arms around you and kissing you as he matches your new rhythm with his own hips.

His fingers are soft as they skate up and down your back, part caress and part him making art on your skin.

You’ve taken things slowly before, plenty of times, but this feels different. This is a new kind of intimacy, more than just the closeness of your bodies, their compatibility.

Somehow you get the feeling that the point of this isn't the climax you're both moving towards, but the closeness itself, the connection.

Something gets stuck in your throat and you pull back so you can look at him. His lips chase yours but then he lets you, his hands moving from your back to your hair and then cupping your face.

“Hey,” he says, and the look in his eyes terrifies you. They are soft and unguarded and there’s something else in them you can’t bring yourself to name.

What scares you even more is that you aren’t entirely sure you aren’t looking at him in the same way. “Hey.”

“It’s okay,” he says, his voice so gentle you feel a lump in your throat.

You shake your head, not really sure why, except this is all too much to handle. Seeing Spencer out in the real world made him too real, and real is not what you’re in the market for. You always assumed he wasn’t either, but the way he’s smothering your face with butterfly kisses and humming soothingly, so completely at odds with the way he fucked you with his whole face ten minutes ago, you think he might be okay with real.

He seems almost… happy with real.

“No,” you say firmly, a hand on his chest pushing him back on the bed. He lets you, but not all the way, resting on his elbows so he can look down his body to where he’s sliding in and out of you.

He gives you a break from his eyes and you breathe in deeply, focusing on the physical sensations instead, the way you were both meant to. The way it still just feels so good although every fibre of your being is telling you to run. Get out, fast as you can, this legend has been burned to a crisp and all the horrors are going to rain down on you if you don’t escape.

But then his hands are on your hips, guiding your movement, holding you in place as his breathing goes ragged and shallow and you know he’s close, holding back and waiting for you. The way he’s always waiting for you.

You feel your own orgasm building, the way he has you positioned so he hits just the right spot deep inside you, but instead of letting yourself go, you squeeze your walls around him in a rhythm that matches his thrusts up into you. 

His eyes go wide and he looks at you in surprise when he comes, you wringing the orgasm out of him. His hand reaches to where you’re joined, finger finding your clit immediately even as he’s collapsing under you, but you swat him away, continue to ride him until he’s spent.

Then you push yourself off him with a hand on his chest, getting yourself off with a finger rubbing roughly against your over-sensitised clit as you lie next to him.

He kisses you as you come, swallowing your moans like they belong to him anyway.

Your thighs lock themselves around your hand and you leave it there, don’t move at all until he runs a hand down your arm, pulling you free from your own grasp. You resist at first, but he doesn’t relent, and when you finally relax your arm, he brings your hand to his mouth and licks your fingers clean, sucking them into his mouth one at a time and cleaning them carefully with his tongue.

When he’s done, he turns your hand into a fist and kisses each of your knuckles in turn. You want to pull your hand away, but you don’t. Instead, you let him nuzzle into you, wrap his arm around you and hold you close.

“Where have you gone?” he asks, very carefully, a few minutes later.

Nowhere, you think, and that’s exactly the problem.

“It’s been a long day,” you say, evasive and cowardly. “I think I just need to go to bed.”

You are in bed, of course, but you both know what you mean. Your own bed.

“You could stay,” he says. His voice is light except not really and it feels like a weighted blanket wrapping itself around you and pinning you down.

You’d pretend you think he just means for the night, and honestly you’d probably agree to that because you’re not really ready to leave yet, but the way his hand stalls and his voice shakes, just a little, makes it impossible to tell yourself he doesn’t mean something more. 

You’ve been ignoring far too many things for far too long, you just thought you were only ignoring them about yourself, which was fine. You’re still in control of that. But ignoring this situation isn’t really something you can do.

You sigh and turn on your side so you’re face to face, a hand going to his cheek. “That’s not really what this is, though, is it?”

“I guess not.” He doesn’t sound sad or upset, exactly. Doesn’t even look it. Maybe you can pretend, after all? Maybe you can still continue to have this? Except then: “I just think it could be.”

You don’t want to tell him it’s over, that he broke the rules you never defined, because you don’t want it to be over. But you also don’t want things to change. Things are good, things are working. There are no demands, no expectations, no future you have to consider, pretend is an option. You’ve always existed just in the moments you share.

Except things are clearly not good, for him. If they were, he wouldn’t want to change them. And you need to respect that. This arrangement only works if you’re both in it in the same way.

“I should go,” you say. Your hand is still on his cheek and you pull it away.

He grips your waist. “You don’t have to leave right now. I—”

“No, I should. I have an early start tomorrow.” It’s the first time you’ve ever deliberately lied to him and you feel like a coward and an asshole. The whole point is to not say anything real so you don’t say something untrue.

“Sure,” he agrees, releasing you immediately. You can’t quite believe that it was really this easy. No argument, no begging, no trying to take it back or change your mind. No calling you on your obvious lie.

Maybe he didn’t mean what you think he meant? Or maybe he doesn’t actually care that much? 

You close your eyes and kiss him, just a quick peck to let it feel more like goodnight and less like goodbye, then get out of bed without looking at him, quickly pull on your panties and then your dress. You don’t bother with the stockings, just pick them up off the floor and grip them in a tight fist.

“I’ll see you, okay?” you say, eyes on the bed about half a foot from his face.

“Sure,” he says again, that same tone, flat and casual.

In the darkness of his hallway you can’t find your bra, but you don’t want to turn on the lights to look for it, so you tell yourself you can just get it another time, unlock the door, and let yourself out. 

~*~*~

ONE

"What the hell is that guy's problem?"

You don't recognize the voice at first, but you do recognize the face of the cop who's still not done rolling his eyes when you and Spencer turn the corner of the hallway at the local precinct. He's the one who spent more time glaring at Spencer than he did actually working when you were all at the crime scene earlier, as if Spencer not shaking his hand was some kind of personal insult and Reid hadn't evaded everyone's handshakes.

His fellow uniform, whose back is to you, shrugs, completely oblivious to the first guy's panicked expression when he sees you approaching. "It's the BAU. You probably have to be just a little crazy to do that job. Maybe he's just crazier than the rest of them."

"It's not strictly speaking a requirement, but it definitely helps," you say brightly, stopping several feet away from them. "We talk to so many assholes everywhere we go, a little bit of craziness helps us power through."

Next to you, you can tell that Spencer has gone rigid; you're not sure if he stopped walking because you did or if he actually froze.

There's really no way to pretend it isn't obvious that the two street cops are talking about him. Especially with the way they glance awkwardly at him and scurry off down the hallway without even acknowledging your comment. Probably lucky that this didn't turn into a full-blown discussion, Hotch wouldn't be impressed if he heard you talked to the locals like that. He'd do his whole Disappointed Dad routine of not shouting but looking very disappointed as he told you he expected better.

You turn to look at Spencer, pulling a face that makes it clear exactly what you think of those guys, but Spencer shakes his head at you.

"I'm not crazy," he says. "Actually my Mysophobia is quite mild. I just don't trust other people to keep their hands clean, and neither should anyone else."

You don't say anything about the disinfectant wipes in his desk drawer back at Quantico, or the way his shoes are lined up neatly in his hallway at home. (The temptation to nudge one of his chucks out of alignment had been almost too great to resist, but you had honestly been worried he'd retaliate by doing something to your car and it'd smell of rotten eggs for six months. He'd do the calculations and decide that revenge was worth having to take a taxi to work until the metro was running again. Or he'd get a ride from Emily.)

"Fuck them," you say dismissively.

"I'd rather not." He pulls a face and it takes you a second to realize he's joking. When you snort with laughter, he smiles at you, looking just a little smug.

"No, that'd probably be even more unhygienic," you agree. He opens his mouth to speak and you hold up a hand to stop him. "Nope. You will not give me any stats on that, you will not ruin sex for me forever."

Spencer closes his mouth like a fish.

"Thank you," you say, nodding.

"Perhaps it'd be easier, though," he says, making no moves to start walking again.

"Never having sex again?" Is he about to give you some honest feedback on your dating life?

"No." He shakes his head, too caught up in his own train of thought to really notice what you asked. "If I just shook people's hands."

"I mean, maybe," you agree, because it probably would make some things simpler. Just, none of those things are important. "But don't make yourself do something you don't want to do because that guy's a douche canoe."

"I'm not," he insists, looking down at his hands.

"Give me your hand sanitizer," you say, reaching out, palm up.

"What?" He frowns at you but immediately digs into his pocket for the small bottle. He squeezes a blob of the cool gel into your cupped palm and you rub your hands together, carefully spreading it on both of them before the alcohol evaporates and it dries out. Spencer is still watching you as he pockets the hand sanitizer.

When you're done, you hold up both hands to him, showing off just how clean they are and he raises his eyebrows in what you assume is approval. So you reach out and take his hand, not to shake but to hold.

"What are you doing?" His hand is stiff but he doesn't pull away.

"Exposure therapy," you say, squeezing.

The muscles in his hand relax slightly, but you can feel his palm getting sweaty. His hand is warmer than you thought it'd be, his skin softer. Somehow you expected calluses and dry skin, but his hands are as soft as the rest of him.

He wraps his fingers around your hand, submitting himself to the project.

"Spencer?" you ask a few seconds later.

"Hmm?"

"Are you counting?"

He looks like he's going to deny it but then he smiles, slightly shamefaced. "Yes."

"One minute, okay?" you tell him.

"Okay," he agrees, nodding, looking both ways as if he's worried someone will see the two of you standing in the middle of a police station hallway at 1 in the morning holding hands.

Some fears are more rational than others, you think to yourself as Spencer mouths, "59, 60," and then quickly lets go of your hand and shoves his own in his pocket.

TWO

You're in Garcia's office, sitting behind her as she types away, making things appear and disappear on her many monitors. Next to you Spencer is leaning against the desk you're perched on, his hands at his sides.

You indicate his pocket with your index finger and he pulls a "what?" face. When you mime rubbing something into your hands he looks at Garcia and then at you before he slowly pulls the hand sanitizer from his pocket and squirts some of it into your hand.

Garcia doesn't notice at all, still typing away, and you reach for Spencer's hand. He lets you take it, but you can see his eyes going slightly wide with panic.

"There are still more than a thousand hits," she says, taking a break from typing and starting to turn around in her chair.

"Can you limit it to just women who were divorced in the last six months?" he asks quickly, moving your joined hands behind your back where hopefully Garcia won't be able to see them.

"I never knew that was your thing, Doctor Reid," she jokes, turning back to her screens. "But I can indeed."

"It's not my thing," Spencer argues, "but it looks like it might be the UnSub's."

"No, I think Penelope's onto something there," you joke. Next to you Spencer is tense, but you're pretty sure it's more to do with the fact that you've got a firm grip on his hand than the joking. So you keep talking as a way to distract him. You're doing him a solid, basically. "How long after the ink is dry on the divorce papers do you make your move, Spencer? Do you hang around outside Family Court, scouting for future girlfriends?"

Penelope lets a giggle slip out, clearly appreciating the absurdness of the joke. Spencer Reid scouting for girlfriends anywhere. You're honestly hilarious.

Spencer on the other hand doesn't even dignify your joke with an answer. You think he might let go of your hand, but no. It hasn't been 60 seconds yet and you're pretty sure he's counting.

"Catching them on the rebound," you go on, smirking. You're going to keep it up until he reacts. "Clever to get them at their most vulnerable."

"Are you projecting?" he asks, head tilted innocently as he looks at you. "It sounds like you've thought about this a lot."

Touché, Doc.

"Ooooh," Garcia hums, sounding impressed.

You squeeze his hand. He squeezes back and then lets go.

If nothing else, this project is going to give you a very good idea of just how long 60 seconds is.

THREE

The case was exhausting, both physically and mentally, and practically everyone is asleep in their seats, with the exception of Hotch who is reviewing paperwork in the seat behind you while JJ snores quietly across from him, her own file abandoned on the table between them.

Next to you Spencer is sleeping with a pillow against the window, forced to make do after Morgan beat him to the bench where he's sleeping soundly under a blanket.

You shift, trying to get comfortable, accidentally hitting Spencer with your elbow.

"Sorry," you whisper when he opens one eye to look at you.

"Why aren't you sleeping?" he asks, opening his other eye.

You shrug, because you don't really want to admit that he was right and you were wrong, you shouldn't have packed your jacket in your hold bag, and you shouldn't have turned down a blanket when Rossi offered you one, and now you're too cold to sleep while Rossi is curled up across the aisle from Hotch, warm and comfortable under the blanket you refused.

Spencer doesn't say anything, just shakes his head at you with a faint smile, and then rearranges his blanket until it's covering you both. You lean closer to him so he can wrap it all the way over you.

"Thanks," you mumble, leaning your head against his shoulder, relaxing in the delicious warmth of the pre-heated blanket.

"Mhmm," he says, pushing his pillow back in place and tilting his head against it once more. When he settles, his hand brushes yours, knuckles moving against your fingers, and you chase him, pushing your hand into his. You might as well make the most of this time and do another therapy session.

Not acknowledging what you're doing in any other way at all, he turns his wrist so he can wrap his hand around yours properly, both of your hands falling into your lap. When you squeeze, he squeezes back, and then you feel his shoulder relax as he settles.

You wait with your eyes closed for the minute to pass, but when the 60 seconds are up he doesn't let go, so you don't either. Maybe he's ready to go for two minutes. You're nodding off when you finally feel his hand move, but instead of pulling it back, he's intertwining his fingers with yours.

His breathing is slow and even, you're pretty sure he's sleeping. Somehow it feels wrong to still be holding his hand when he's not aware of it, like you're… overstepping some boundary, tricking him. You try to pull away your hand, loosening your grip on him so you can push his hand back in his own lap, but he tightens his grip. It's not exactly firm, but definitely determined.

You smile, closing your eyes and burrowing closer to him until you're comfortable.

You're woken up a few hours later by him gently nudging you with his shoulder and then saying dryly, "You drooled on me."

His fingers are still braided through yours under the blanket and you use your other hand to wipe your chin and then the knit of his cardigan. "Sorry."

When you look at him his face is so close you can't really interpret his expression, but you don't think he looks disgusted.

Also, he hasn't let go of your hand.

"We're landing," you say, looking out the window at the Quantico air strip coming into view.

"That's why I woke you up," he replies.

"Oh." You honestly thought it was to complain about the drooling.

His thumb brushes a soothing circle on the back of your hand, and then he carefully releases you, pulling his hand away just in time to be able to give the blanket to JJ so she can stow it away.

You smile at him, impressed, and he smiles back.

FOUR

The bar is crowded but Emily and JJ managed to secure a table big enough for the whole team. There's a constant shuffling of seats, people drifting to the dance floor and back again, going to buy rounds of drinks, using the restrooms; and somehow you end up nursing your second piña colada pressed into Spencer's side while he's discussing interrogation techniques with Hotch and you're trying to understand what Penelope is telling you about the changes she made to her computer setup in excruciating detail.

Spencer shifts, moving even closer to you when Morgan pushes onto the rounded bench on Hotch's other side, and his hand ends up trapped between your thighs somehow. You move closer to Garcia, giving him space to pull his hand free, trying to pretend you don't notice the way his hand strokes your leg when he removes it.

Because he's not stroking your leg, he's just… moving his hand.

You clear your throat and nod, because Penelope looks like that's the reaction she's expecting, and she grins. "You weren't listening, were you?"

Spencer's hand is resting on his thigh now, but you're sitting so close to him that his pinky finger is still brushing your leg every time one of you moves. You're maybe moving a lot, not particularly comfortable on the bench seat.

You grimace in apology, your own hand settling on your thigh, so close to his that you could probably just stretch out your pinky and touch his.

"Well if you don't want to talk about my computer you can just tell me all about the date you went on last week," Penelope says and you realize this was her plan all along. Sneaky bitch, oh how you love her.

Next to you Spencer shifts again, his whole body going rigid when his pinky touches yours. You can feel him turn to look at you and when your eyes meet, he's frowning. You can guess what's bothering him, of course. Your hands touching under the table and you haven't been anywhere near hand sanitizer for well over an hour. What you have been doing is touching all sorts of unclean things, like the bar and the bench and money, the ultimate culprit in the exchange of germs, or so you've been told once.

Well, good. Time for him to lose the training wheels, you decide, and take his hand in yours, smiling with what you hope looks like encouragement.

His frown deepens, like he's thinking through a complicated game of chess, or maybe trying to talk himself off a ledge, and then he curls his fingers around yours, turning back to Hotch, his focus clearly going back to the conversation he and Morgan are having.

"Oh, it was great," you tell Penelope, feeling a little spark of excitement at how well Spencer's doing with his whole desensitization. You're kind of a genius for coming up with this, you tell yourself, pleased little butterflies fluttering around your stomach while Spencer's thumb rubs against your hand. "Yeah, he told me after dinner that he forgot his credit card so I had to pay, then suggested we both go back to his place because then we could share the taxi I'd also be paying for."

Penelope snorts. "And did you?"

You scoff. "No! I gave him three bucks and told him to take the metro, then I took a taxi home. By myself."

She laughs, delighted and you launch into the whole sorry tale about this absolute turd of a man you had to spend nearly two hours sitting across from at a restaurant because you hadn't organized a fake emergency call.

Next to you, Spencer's back goes less rigid as he clearly gets used to holding another person's unsanitized hand in this uncontrolled environment.

You squeeze his fingers, trying to convey how impressed you are by his progress.

He squeezes back, moving in his seat so his arm isn't bent at an odd angle under the table, making sure you're sitting so close that your joined hands aren't noticeable to anyone else. Your hands are resting on your thigh, his long fingers brushing against your tights. Or, well, not so much 'brushing' as, sort of, kind of stroking your leg, maybe? Not deliberately, of course, you know that, it's just what happens when you're both forever being jostled around as other people move around you.

Penelope gets up to go to the bar and really, there's plenty of space on your other side now, you could move away from Spencer's side, but then you'd have to let go of his hand, so you stay where you are, reluctant to let go before he does. He's doing so well, you want to see just how long he's able to do this for.

The room isn't cold, but somehow you still have goosebumps.

"Sorry about your date," he says suddenly, head tilted towards you, voice so low that no-one else can hear him.

You turn to look at him. "Don't be. My friend Katie set me up, she has terrible taste in men. The only surprising thing about that date is that she didn't want him for herself."

"Still. It sounded like you had a pretty bad time."

You shrug, one arm moving against his. "It's fine. Not the end of the world. There will be other dates, and maybe they'll be less terrible."

Spencer frowns, then nods. "Yeah, definitely."

"Why do you look so unconvinced? You think I'm doomed to a life of terrible dates?"

"No." He's shaking his head, but that frown isn't going anywhere. "That's not it."

"Then what?"

Under the table, Spencer's grip on your hand tightens and he looks uncomfortable. You wonder if he managed to forget he was holding your hand and now he realized it and wants to let go.

"It's fine," you tell him, because it is. He's been holding your hand for almost half an hour, your shoulder is actually getting a little stiff by this point. "You did really well."

"What?"

You squeeze his hand, since you can't exactly blurt out 'you're doing a very good job holding my hand' in front of all your teammates. Who knows what they'd read into that?

Spencer blinks. "Oh. Right. Thanks."

When you let go of his hand, it takes a few seconds for his fingers to loosen their grip, but when he does, you catch him surreptitiously rubbing his hand against his knee, not quite like he's trying to wipe you off, but still. Kind of like that.

When he gets up to leave half an hour later, he looks kind of uncomfortable when he says goodnight to you, raising his arms, and for a mad second you think he's going to hug you, but then he adjusts his satchel and you realize it was just falling off his shoulder.

FIVE

One of your favorite things about Spencer is, although his head can get kind of deep in the work clouds, once the case is over, if there's time before the jet takes you back home, you can pretty much always tempt him to go book shopping with you.

Sometimes you don't even really have to tempt him, because he has that eidetic memory, and he remembers you once telling him how you spent an entire day in your favorite bookshop in the world when you were in high school and now here you are in Portland and JJ has dismissed you both since you weren't on the team that did any actual apprehending of anyone, so there's less paperwork for you to do.

Spencer glances at his watch and then at JJ and then he tilts his head towards the exit while looking at you. And half an hour later, you're in heaven.

Book heaven.

You get distracted in the used books section, browsing biographies, and lose track of Spencer. When you resurface in Poetry it's been almost an hour and you realize you should probably find him. If you make everyone wait for you at the jet, they're not going to look the other way when you sneak off ever again.

You go through the aisles, looking for him, fairly certain he's in the used books section as well. There's enough to look at here, he wouldn't have made it to the new books, soulless historyless paperbacks.

You're not sure how you know that he's close, you just do. He's in the next aisle, definitely, and you're trying to decide if you should sneak up on him or that'd be a mistake considering what you both spent the last four days doing.

But then you hear it: "We have the paperback version as well, if you prefer."

You don't actually have to look to know this woman is flirting with Spencer. Her voice is so loaded with it, it's amazing the fire alarms aren't going off.

"Oh, that's fine. I prefer hardbacks." Spencer is polite but friendly in a way that's definitely not a rejection and you give in to temptation and remove a few books from the shelf so you can peer into their aisle.

18th century philosophy. Because of course.

And of course that woman is pretty with her nose piercing and purple-tinted hair and t-shirt that's just a little tighter than it's probably supposed to be, but in the most flattering way. A t-shirt that says, very loudly, "I can get you all the books you want, anytime, just come to bed with me."

Not literally, that would have been super weird to put on a work uniform, but it's definitely what the shop logo stretched out across her chest is implying.

"Well, if you need anything, just let me know. I'm Frankie, by the way." You wonder if the fire alarms are silent but fire trucks are actually on their way.

"Oh. Thanks," Spencer says and you can see his cheeks going all splotchy and red like he's too warm.

You stand up on tiptoes, which changes your view, and you realize why he looks like he's boiling.

She's touching his hand.

How unprofessional!

For just a second you think you've turned into your grandmother, who also cares way too much how people in the service industry behave even if their behavior has zero impact on her, and you think you might ask to speak to the manager, but then Spencer shakes his head no to something this absolute trollop just said, and which you didn't hear because your ears were ringing with righteous indignation, and she releases him.

And you realize something. You try not to, but you can't help it.

Because you're relieved. You don't care that this woman talks to customers like she wants to lick honey off of them, just so long as those customers aren't Spencer.

And you'd feel bad that clearly your exposure therapy hasn't really worked yet, because he couldn't have looked less comfortable and you know he gets shy sometimes, and it seemed clear that he liked her, and maybe if you had done a better job preparing him for this he would have been okay with her touching him.

Maybe you should also feel bad about the fact that there's a little part of you that's delighted that he'll let you hold his hand and not that woman.

No, you should definitely feel bad about that. Except you don't want any woman holding his hand other than you.

Once the aspiring honey-licker is gone, you walk into Spencer's aisle, trying to look like you didn't know he was there. If he notices, he doesn't say anything, just holds up the book he definitely already read most of and tells you he's going to buy it.

"You wouldn't prefer the paperback?" you ask innocently. He doesn't know you know, after all.

He looks at you, then at the gap in the bookshelf you forgot to refill, then back at you. "No." He says it like it's simple and your whole world didn't just spin on its axis.

Oh.

Your stomach does a little flip as you try not to read anything into that completely innocuous answer. Then he starts walking towards the cash registers, moving the book to the hand that's further from you, the one closest to you hanging loosely at his side.

You take it, carefully wrapping your hand around his, and he does the same, his fingers curling themselves around you.

You pass the woman he didn't want touching him earlier, and you think he might let go of you, but instead he just smiles politely at her, his grip on you not changing at all.

She smiles back, and then she smiles at you, looking all friendly and maybe a little bit apologetic and not at all like she wants to claw your eyes out.

You hope you smile back, but you honestly aren't sure what your face is doing at all.

You just know you're holding Spencer's hand and you don't want to let go.

Terrifying.

ONE

This was your idea. Spencer has reminded himself of that fact 27 times on his way from his apartment to the cinema.

He had asked Emily to go to the Eisenstein festival with him, she had made up some transparent excuse like he wasn't a professional lie detector, and you had said, "I'll go with you, Spencer. It sounds like fun."

And his lie detector just short circuited right then and there.

There's no part of him that thinks you're going to enjoy sitting through any one of the three movies that are playing back to back today, but he didn't question it. He did rewind mentally to make sure you had heard enough of the conversation to understand what he had been suggesting, and yes. You were there the whole time, actually sitting next to Emily when he had first brought it up.

But if you only said it sounded like fun because you felt sorry for him that no-one wanted to go with him to his black and white, Soviet era movie marathon, then he was going to just pretend he didn't notice.

And then he'd sit next to you in that cinema for at least 278 minutes, depending on the versions they were screening which the poster had been frustratingly vague about. Plus commercials. All in all, he'd estimate at least five hours. Sitting next to you. In a dark cinema.

Spencer doesn't believe in prayers or wishing on shooting stars, but he would have done both yesterday if he thought it might have done anything to lower the risk of a case coming up and cancelling your plans together. But he didn't need to, because here he is.

You're already there when he arrives, standing under the awning outside looking at your phone, and for just a second he's worried there's a text from JJ and you're being called into work, but his own phone hasn't said anything at all, and when you look up and spot him you smile, not apologetically or with anything like regret (real or pretend), but like you're genuinely happy to see him.

"Perfect timing," you say when he stops in front of you.

Spencer is seven minutes early. He smiles.

"Katie has been texting me non-stop." You hold up your phone as if to show him, and it actually beeps and lights up as if you planned it.

"Your friend with terrible taste in men?" There could be other Katies, obviously, but he's pretty sure this is the only one you've mentioned knowing.

"Uhhuh. She found another gem. She started dating a guy who's—and I could not be more certain of this—involved in some Ponzi scheme. He's got a friend who's single and she's convinced we'd hit it off." You open the text and read it, rolling your eyes, and then you shove your phone at him.

'Come on just give him a chance. What do you have to lose?' Spencer hands the phone back to you. "Does she mean, other than your money?"

You snort. "Who cares about money, Spencer? What about my dignity?"

He smiles, blowing an amused huff of air out through his nose. "I suppose there's that as well," he agrees. How much dignity does he have left considering the fact that he's about to spend his Sunday with you watching movies he knows you won't enjoy, when he could have explained to you that you wouldn't enjoy them and why, but he chose not to, because he didn't want you to back out?

Considering the fact that you spending time with him out of pity doesn't stop him looking forward to it? Considering the fact that he spent the entire morning wondering if you're going to take his hand in the cinema and actually getting excited at the prospect of sitting in a dark cinema screen holding his colleague's hand because she thinks she's curing him of… caring about hygiene?

Spencer isn't sure how dignity is measured, but he is pretty sure he doesn't have a whole lot of it left to measure.

"We're getting popcorn, right?" you ask, walking ahead of him into the cinema.

Spencer had planned on getting a coffee, maybe some pretzels. It's barely 11AM. "Of course."

At the concession stand you start picking up bags of candy at what he assumes is random, but then you show him two bags of pretzels, holding them up in turn. There's a third option, but he's never eaten that one in the office and you haven't touched it. He shrugs because he's fine with either and you throw both on the counter. "And a large popcorn with butter and a diet coke and a coffee with more sugar than you think should be legal. Actually, once you hit that point, just add a little more."

The teenager behind the counter looks at you, wide-eyed and a little scared.

"Three sugars," Spencer corrects you and you smirk.

He shakes his head at you, nudging you away from the counter before you can do any more damage. Doing some quick calculations based on what you've picked up, he throws some money on the counter before you can get your purse open.

"I was going to pay," you say, eyebrows furrowed. "You got the tickets."

Spencer, who can see the remainder of his dignity escaping out the door as he goes through the rites of an actual date, just shrugs. "You're doing me a favor, coming with me. The least I can do is feed you."

You look up at him. "Oh. I figured we'd go out for food after?"

He looks at the mountain of snacks you picked up, the tub of popcorn in your arm, bigger than your head. There's no way he can look you in the eye right now, not when you basically said you want to go out for dinner. With him. "And what's this? Appetizers?"

"No." You hug the popcorn closer like he threatened to take them away from you. "But aren't these movies seven years long? I feel like Russian movies are going to be long."

"They're not that long." He holds the door open and you walk into the screen ahead of him. The room is about half full, with people mostly centered in the middle rows. The front and back rows are both empty.

You stop, turning to look at him. "Where do you want to sit?"

Normally he'd prefer the front row, for his eyesight, but he nods his head towards the back row instead. You look just a little surprised, but walk in ahead of him, settling in one of the seats in the middle of the row.

He deposits your appetizers on the little table attached to his seat and sits down next to you. And then he waits.

You spend the first half hour eating popcorn, offering the tub to him at regular intervals, and then you open the bag of twizzlers, slowly chewing your way through one of them as you squirm in your seat.

"Are you scared you'll fall asleep if you sit still for too long?" he leans in and whispers.

You jump, startled. "No. I'm just hoping I can find the right angle and then this will make sense to me."

"It won't," he whispers. "Sit still."

Then he very casually and not at all deliberately puts his lower arm on the armrest between your seats, his hand within easy reach. It has worked well in the past, after all, there is previous evidence that his method is sound. If he makes his hand available, maybe allows his fingers to touch yours, more often than not you will take his hand.

It's a pretty devious thing to do, he's aware of that, and he's not really sure when your supposed exposure therapy stopped being something he allowed you to do because you seemed so determined to help him, and instead changed into something he didn't really mind before finally becoming something he actually wants you to do.

He wants to hold your hand, he wants to touch you, and he does not want your friend Katie to set you up on any more dates. Because you're right: statistically, eventually one of them will be a nice guy, and you'll like him.

But he won't - and this is the real problem here - be Spencer.

The first movie ends and you still haven't made any moves to touch his hand. You haven't actually moved much at all, and for a while he thought you had fallen asleep, but no. You were staring at the screen, your nose scrunched up adorably as you tried to follow the narrative.

Maybe Spencer should have double-checked that there would be subtitles…

When the lights come on for the 15 minute break between screenings, you get out of your seat. "I've just gotta—" you trail off, pointing at the exit to the lobby and the other people making their way out.

"You forgot your purse," he says, grabbing it from your seat and holding it out to you after you've passed him.

You turn and stare at him. "What?"

"If you're going to sneak off." He's mostly joking. Mostly. He's also a little bit worried you do want to leave.

But then you smile, shaking your head at him like he's being silly, and he feels like maybe he was.

"We can do something else," he offers all the same. Maybe you don't want to get away from him, but you could still want to get away from Eisenstein.

You take a step back towards him, almost but not quite knocking your knee against his. "Spencer, we're not leaving. There are two movies left, I'm coming back."

"You just want me to feed you," he says. Mainly to remind himself that's something you said you expected to happen.

Dinner and a movie. Would it be possible for you to do anything more date-like? In a completely platonic way, of course. Two more movies left for you to platonically take his hand.

"Exactly," you say, and this time you do actually nudge him with your leg. Luckily you aren't looking at him, so you don't see the way he has to suck a pleased smile all the way into his mouth.

This time, he lets you walk away, and when you return nine minutes later, you're holding another coffee for him. "You take it black, right?" you joke, handing it to him.

He takes a sip and you ordered it just the way he likes it, which he knew you would. "Thanks."

When he puts the coffee back in the cup holder between your seats, he brushes against your arm, sitting on the edge of the armrest. Strictly speaking the thing isn't wide enough for two, it's very much a territory to negotiate over, but you're taking up less than half of it.

Spencer spends about ten minutes wringing his hands in his lap, trying to decipher the situation. You shift, twice, but your hand doesn't move. It's still there, half on, half off the armrest.

Like it's undecided, or like it's trying to run away and you aren't letting it, or like it wants to be there and you don't want it to.

How is he supposed to know what to do?

The answer is probably that he isn't supposed to do anything. This isn't a date, it only looks like one from a distance, and just because he can't focus on the movie because all he can think about is holding your hand, that doesn't mean you want him to. You haven't technically told him that his exposure therapy is over, but you haven't held his hand since Portland, two weeks ago.

Like maybe doing it in public was some kind of graduation ceremony and didn't make him want to stay in that bookshop forever, never mind catching the jet back to Quantico.

He shifts, sighing deeply, only realizing how loud it was when you turn to look at him. "Sorry."

"You okay?" you whisper, leaning a little closer to him.

He's not, not at all. He's spiraling just a little bit. "Yeah, of course."

You look at him carefully, like maybe you don't believe him, and he turns back to face the screen so he doesn't have to look you in the eye. Then he takes a deep breath and places his arm on the armrest, taking up most of the remaining space on it.

His pinky finger is maybe an eighth of an inch away from yours and he digs it into the velvet of the armrest to stop it from twitching and accidentally touching you, although he's not quite sure why.

Maybe because it feels too much like begging to be touched, suddenly, after not being touched at all for so long?

But then, while the score crescendos dramatically, he suddenly feels it: Your pinky finger feathering along his and then away. At first he thinks he imagined it, but then it happens again, and again. And this time, it actually settles against his.

When Spencer turns to look at you, you're staring intently at the screen, looking for all the world like you're completely engrossed in the movie.

He moves his pinky so it's covering yours.

You don't move. At all.

He moves his pinky a little more, until it's settling on your ring finger.

You still aren't moving.

He feels his heart rate increase, the way it might do ahead of a myocardial infarction, or possibly a panic attack. But there's no pain in his left arm, no cold sweats, no shortness of breath.

He swallows, then he places his hand over yours, covering it completely.

Your thumb twitches but you don't pull away, so Spencer decides he might as well go for broke and wrap his fingers around your hand.

That's it, he's done it. He's holding your hand.

And then you move, your hand shifting. He's about to release you, worried he overstepped, but all you do is turn your hand and intertwine your fingers with his, pulling his hand off the armrest and into your lap.

Spencer double-checks the signals his body is sending him, just to make completely sure this isn't a heart attack.

He turns to look at you, and he's pretty sure you're smiling, your eyes still on the screen. "Okay?" he asks.

You turn your head and now he's sure you're smiling. "Of course."

When the second movie ends, you don't get up. Your hand is still intertwined with his, resting in your lap, and Spencer hopes you'll never move.

"This, um, this exposure therapy has really worked well," you say and there's something in your voice that makes him look at you.

"I guess," he says, because he's not convinced it has, really. He's pretty sure he won't be shaking anyone's hand unless it's yours.

You lift up your joined hands to show him. "I mean, we've been holding hands for like an hour."

He blinks.

"It's nice." Your voice is soft and you aren't looking at him, so he lets himself smile at your words.

'Nice' doesn't really cover it at all. "Yeah."