which could mean nothing

“I’m not frightened.” His mouth pulls to one side, though his eyes stray to the curtain again. “I just want to make sure you’re comfortable.”

You look back at him. He’s dressed slightly better than the occasion requires, which is normal enough that you noticed only in passing when he arrived at your flat. His tie is patterned but subdued, and his hair keeps falling forwards no matter how often he pushes it away. His coat is still unbuttoned despite the January cold; he began telling you about Rossi’s cooking before you made it out of your building and apparently forgot there were buttons involved.

The knot of his tie has worked its way a little to the left. You reach up to straighten it. “I’m comfortable.”

His attention drops to your hands. “You’re cold.”

“I’m standing outside in January.”

“You loosened the scarf.”

“It made me look like I was being strangled by a blanket.”

“It’s cashmere.”

You glance down at the loosened scarf. “I know. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t aggressive.”

Spencer’s smile spreads slowly, warm and crooked and bright enough to make you forget the weather for a second. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“You understood me.”

“I usually do.”

The door opens before you can answer. Rossi takes in the two of you on his porch — your fingers still resting against Spencer’s tie, Spencer standing close enough that the sleeve of his coat brushes yours — and lets his eyes linger on your hand before returning to Reid.

“Reid.” He steps aside. “And you must be the woman who stole his seat.”

You turn on Spencer. “You told him that?”

“It’s how we met.”

“That’s not how we met.”

Rossi accepts your coat. You unwind the scarf and hold it out without looking; Spencer takes it automatically, hanging it beside your coat while he continues to regard you with the stubborn composure of someone who possesses an eidetic memory and has appointed himself sole custodian of the past.

“There was a programme on the chair,” he says.

“There was rubbish on the chair.”

“It was the programme for the lecture.”

“Which had already started.”

“That doesn’t make it rubbish.”

Rossi closes the door behind you. “You can argue the case over dinner. I’ve heard Reid’s testimony several times.”

You follow him into the hall, looking sideways at Spencer. “How many times have you told this story?”

“It comes up more often than you’d think.”

Before you can ask how a disagreement over auditorium seating could possibly come up at the Behavioral Analysis Unit, someone makes a small, delighted noise at the end of the hallway.

Garcia appears in a sweep of colour, bracelets and barely restrained curiosity. “You’re real.”

“Garcia,” Spencer warns.

“I never suggested she wasn’t.” She reaches you and takes both your hands, looking you over with such open pleasure that it’s impossible to feel inspected. “I’m Penelope. I have been waiting so patiently to meet you that I think I deserve official recognition from the Bureau.”

“You sent me four messages this afternoon,” Spencer says.

Garcia dismisses this with a flick of her bracelets. “And every one of them was supportive.”

“One of them was nine exclamation marks.”

She hugs you before you have decided whether handshakes are still an option. Over her shoulder, you find Spencer watching you, ready to intervene and relieved when he sees he doesn’t have to. He knows you have never enjoyed entering a room full of strangers. He also knows that Garcia has rendered strangers impossible within thirty seconds.

Morgan comes around the corner carrying two bottles of wine. “So this is who’s been taking up all your Thursdays.”

Spencer’s head turns. “She doesn’t take them up.”

“You make that sound worse,” you tell him.

“I mean, I choose to spend them with you.”

Morgan’s eyebrows rise. “And disappear before anyone can give you another file.”

Spencer has already turned back to you, taking the bag from your shoulder before you have to hitch it back into place.

“I leave work at a reasonable time on Thursdays,” he adds. “That isn’t disappearing.”

“You texted me from the lift last week saying, ‘I escaped.’”

“They’d already given me three,” he says, as though this settles the choice of verb.

Morgan studies the two of you for another second, then gives you a slow nod. “You’re going to fit in fine.”

The rest of the introductions happen in Rossi’s living room, where the fire is lit and every available surface has acquired either a glass or a plate. JJ greets you with an easy warmth that eases the last of your nerves. Hotch is more reserved, although the handshake he offers comes with a sincere, “It’s good to finally meet you.”

Between the BAU’s cases and your own habit of declining invitations to crowded gatherings, finally becomes the common thread of the evening. Oddly, the feeling is mutual. Spencer has been talking about his team for seven years, long enough that you sometimes forget you’ve never actually met any of them. Tara, seated on the arm of a chair, tells you that she has only known Spencer for a few months and has somehow still heard enough about you to recognise your name immediately. 

You look at him. “What have you been telling these people?”

“Not much.”

Morgan sets the wine beside Rossi’s decanter. “He brings you up more than he thinks he does.”

“Only when something reminds me of her,” Spencer says.

“So whenever anyone sits in a chair,” you say.

“Only if they sit in my seat.”

“That wasn’t your seat.”

Tara looks between you. “I’m beginning to see how you two have kept an argument about a chair going for seven years.”

“Seven years, two months and six days,” Spencer corrects.

You’re accustomed to this. Spencer remembers the first time you met, the first film you watched together and the day you discovered the little bookshop that now holds a hard-won place in your Thursday routine. He remembers what you ordered the first time you dragged him to your favourite café and exactly which joke made you choke on it. None of it has ever seemed remarkable when it’s simply the way his mind works and the shape your life has taken around his. Across the room, JJ’s gaze rests on him for a moment before returning to you.

“That’s Spencer,” you say, because it is.

“It is,” JJ agrees, a small smile tucked into the words, and Rossi calls everyone to the table before you can work out what she finds funny.

He has prepared enough food for twice as many people and accepts praise as his due. The conversation moves easily around you, propelled by the overlapping stories of people who spend too much time together. Morgan disputes Rossi’s version of an arrest in Baltimore; JJ supplies the part both men have omitted. Tara waits until they have nearly finished before revealing that Garcia showed her the security footage and neither account is accurate.

At the head of the table, Hotch listens with the patience of a man who has long since accepted that authority has limits.

As everyone gathers around the table, Spencer rests a hand on the back of an empty chair. You slip into it without either of you acknowledging the gesture, and he takes the seat to your right, tucking your bag safely beside his feet.

The conversation follows everyone to the table, breaking and reforming as chairs are pulled in and Rossi begins sending dishes around. When the bread reaches Spencer, he selects the darker end piece before handing you the basket. He’s looking down at his plate, but you catch the twitch at the corner of his mouth.

You dig beneath the slices for the remaining end and set it on your plate.

“Did you just take that?”

He arranges his face into innocence. “Take what?”

“You know I like the end.”

“There are two ends.”

“You took the better one.”

“They’re structurally identical.”

“They absolutely are not.”

He lets you make your case, then exchanges his piece for the one on your plate with the ease of a ritual completed many times before. You tear the bread in half and put half back on his plate, which is when you notice Tara watching from across the table, amusement gathering at one corner of her mouth.

“What?” you ask.

“Nothing.” She reaches for her wine. “I’m learning.”

Spencer leans nearer to you. “About bread?”

You give him a look and take a bite. He glances across at Tara, clearly tempted to investigate.

“Don’t make the face,” you warn.

“What face?”

“The one you make before asking a question that adds twenty minutes to a conversation.”

Spencer turns to you, brow furrowed and mouth pulled into a small, dubious line. “I don’t have a face for that.”

“You do,” JJ says from his other side.

Morgan points his fork at her. “He definitely does.”

Spencer appeals to Hotch, who takes a measured drink of wine. “You do.”

The table breaks into laughter, Spencer along with it. His head tips back, his eyes close, and the smile opens across his face without the flicker of self-consciousness that sometimes follows when he realises a room is watching him. You know the quieter laugh he uses when he’s trying not to encourage you, the startled one that escapes when you catch him off guard, the breathless, helpless version that makes him fold forwards and hide his face. This one is easy and bright. He looks happy.

You are still watching when he turns back. The laughter remains in his eyes as his expression shifts into a question, and only then do you notice the small streak of sauce near the corner of his mouth.

“Hold still.” You wipe it away with your thumb before it occurs to you that a napkin would have done the job just as well.

His lips part at the touch. For a second, the noise of the table seems to move around the two of you, then you drop your hand and reach for your glass. By the time Spencer does the same, Morgan has turned the conversation towards Rossi’s wine.

Later, once the plates have been cleared and Rossi produces a tiramisu large enough to require architectural planning, Garcia asks how you and Spencer became friends after what she calls the Auditorium Incident.

“She followed me outside,” Spencer says.

“You followed me.” You turn towards him, eyebrows raised at the version of events he has chosen to present. “Apparently handing me a pen and saying ‘Here’ was supposed to communicate a short-term loan.”

“I thought it was obvious.”

Morgan rests an elbow on the table. “Was this at least a good pen?”

“No. It leaked all over my hand.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell her when she walked away.”

JJ glances between you. “So you followed a woman out of a lecture hall over a defective pen?”

“I didn’t follow her,” Spencer says, a little too quickly. “She was walking towards the Metro.”

“I was walking towards coffee. He spent three blocks correcting a route I wasn’t taking.”

Garcia presses both hands to her heart. “And he came with you.”

“It had started raining,” Spencer says.

JJ looks at him. “You hate coffee shops.”

“They’re usually loud.”

“That one was,” you say. “You stayed after the rain stopped anyway.”

He looks at you, momentarily caught without a correction. His knee has rested against yours beneath the table for most of the conversation, warm and solid through two layers of clothing. “You were interesting.”

The answer is simple, offered without embarrassment. Before you can decide what to do with it, Rossi cuts into the tiramisu. “And the rest is seven years, two months and six days of arguing.”

“We don’t always argue,” Spencer says.

“You called me at midnight last week because my bookshelf leans.”

“It leans towards your bed.”

“Protectively.”

He gives you a long, suffering look. “It’s going to fall on you.”

Hotch hides a smile behind his wine. “He may have a point.”

“Thank you,” Spencer says, vindicated, and you promise the table that when he appears at your flat with a spirit level, they are all invited to help him.

The evening loosens after dessert. Rossi opens another bottle of wine, Morgan finds music, and people drift between the living room and kitchen as the conversation divides into smaller pieces. You spend a while talking to JJ and Tara near the fire. Spencer is pulled into a discussion with Hotch on the other side of the room, but his attention returns to you often enough that you begin to anticipate it. You look up, and his eyes are already there.

He never stares. His gaze finds yours, checks, and returns to the conversation. When Garcia drops onto the sofa beside you with enough force to send your glass wobbling, his hand lifts from across the room before you catch it yourself.

You raise the rescued glass in his direction. He smiles, lets his hand fall and turns back to Hotch.

Between the fire and the overlapping voices, the room soon grows too warm. You finish what remains in your glass, leave it on the side table beside Garcia and slip through the doors onto the back terrace. At the stone railing, you draw one full breath of cold air before the door opens behind you.

“You’re going to say you told me so,” you say.

Spencer settles your coat over your shoulders. “I was going to ask why you came outside without this.” He draws the fabric closed at your throat, making sure your hair stays clear of the collar.

“Same sentiment.”

“Not exactly.”

You turn before he has taken his hands away, leaving the two of you close enough that his hands slide down to your elbows instead. Through the glass doors, Garcia is looking directly at you. Morgan comes up beside her, follows her gaze and says something you can’t hear.

“What are they doing?”

Spencer glances over his shoulder. Both of them disappear from the window.

“I don’t know.”

“They’re very strange.”

“They like you.”

His certainty draws your attention back to him. “They’ve known me for three hours.” You reconsider this, glancing towards the living room. “Then again, Garcia gave me copies of your childhood photographs.”

Spencer’s eyebrows lift. “She gave you copies?”

“And made me promise Morgan would never see them. You were very serious about that chess trophy.”

Spencer smiles, small and pleased. “That means she trusts you.” 

You laugh, and his thumbs shift against the sleeves of your coat. The movement is small, nearly absent-minded. You have held his hand through turbulence, hooked an arm through his in crowded streets and fallen asleep against his shoulder during films neither of you remembers finishing. This belongs to the same familiar language, a touch whose meaning has never required either of you to stop and examine it.

You rest your hands against the front of his jacket. “I like them too.”

The line of his shoulders softens. “I knew you would.”

“Even Morgan.”

“That’s premature.”

The door opens, and Morgan sticks his head outside. “We can hear you, genius.”

Spencer looks back at him without removing his hands from your arms. “She said she likes you.”

“I heard the rest too.” Morgan gives you a wounded look before retreating inside.

Spencer’s grin is immediate and entirely unrepentant. It stays with him as you go back indoors together, his hand resting lightly between your shoulder blades. Once the doors close, he eases the coat from your shoulders before the heat can become uncomfortable and carries it back to the hall.

It’s close to midnight when people begin leaving. Hotch goes first, followed shortly by JJ. Morgan hugs you and tells you to come back even if Reid doesn’t, Garcia informs him that threatening a guest is poor etiquette and then hugs you twice as hard. By the time Tara finds her coat, Spencer is helping Rossi carry glasses into the kitchen, although the discussion drifting down the hallway suggests that helping involves an argument about the safest way to store crystal.

“It was lovely meeting you,” Tara says. She loops her scarf around her neck, then glances towards the kitchen with affectionate amusement. “I understand now why he keeps disappearing on Thursdays.”

“He’ll be pleased you believe it counts as disappearing.”

“I’m sure he’ll explain the distinction to me at length on Monday.” She reaches for the door, then pauses. “I’ll admit, I was confused at first. Reid talks about you all the time, but he never mentioned you were his girlfriend.”

The word is gentle, tossed into the conversation without any reason to be careful with it.

“His girlfriend?”

Tara looks back at you. The realisation reaches her a moment later. “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought the two of you were together.”

Behind her, Garcia stops rearranging the bracelets on her wrist.

“No.” The answer comes automatically. It is a simple fact. You and Spencer have never crossed that line or even discussed it. The rest ought to follow just as easily. Instead, we’re just friends catches somewhere behind your teeth, suddenly too small to account for seven years of Thursdays and everything the others have been watching all evening. The evening begins moving through your mind again, Rossi opening the door to find your hand on Spencer’s tie, Morgan’s eyebrows when he said Spencer chose to spend Thursdays with you, JJ’s quiet smile, Tara watching the bread pass between your plates, Garcia and Morgan vanishing from the terrace window. “It’s not like that. We’re not—”

“You ready?”

Spencer comes down the hallway with your bag in one hand. His attention passes from your face to Tara’s and then to Garcia, who has become far too interested in her bracelets.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” Tara says, recovering first. “I was saying goodnight.”

You can’t find the end of the sentence you were saying. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

He holds your coat while you slip your arms into it and frees your hair from beneath the collar with practised fingers. The touch is the same one you have barely noticed a hundred times. Now the word girlfriend seems to catch against it.

Rossi appears at the end of the hallway. He surveys Tara, whose hand is still on the door, Garcia valiantly looking elsewhere and Spencer adjusting your scarf. “Goodnight,” he says, much too entertained for someone who can’t possibly know what has just happened.

By the time the two of you reach the Metro, Spencer has filled the walk with an account of Rossi insisting tiramisu can’t be made properly without alcohol. He talks while you wait on the platform and keeps going once you’re inside the carriage. The earliest known versions of the dessert lead to the disputed origins of ladyfingers, which somehow bring him back to the argument about stacking Rossi’s crystal.

Usually, you interrupt. You ask questions, argue over details or tug him back to the original point when one tangent begins producing another. Tonight, you watch his reflection in the darkened window while he talks. His curls have grown increasingly disordered over the course of the evening, and one falls across his forehead whenever he turns towards you. Interest animates his whole face — his eyes brighten, his hands move with the rhythm of his words, and every trace of fatigue leaves him for as long as the thought holds him.

You know all of this because you have always known him. What it does to you when he turns that attention on you is hardly new; the part you have never allowed yourself to question is what any of it means from his side. A room full of profilers watched the two of you for a few hours and assumed they already knew. Tara gave that assumption a name, and now every small, familiar thing seems to return carrying the possibility with it.

When the train lurches around a curve, Spencer’s hand closes lightly around your forearm. He releases you once you are steady, still talking. You feel the place his fingers were long after the warmth is gone.

Outside the station, the pavement is damp from an earlier rain, catching the streetlights in long, blurred reflections. Spencer slows his stride to yours without acknowledging the adjustment. He has glanced at you more than once since the train pulled away, waiting at the end of a sentence as though he expects you to tug the conversation elsewhere, and each time he has gone on when you don’t. You’re only a few blocks from home when his explanation of why Rossi’s crystal glasses should never be stacked trails off.

“Everything okay?” His words soften as he studies your face. “You’ve been unusually quiet.”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

He doesn’t look convinced, but he lets you have the answer. You make it another half-block before a disbelieving laugh slips out.

“What?”

You shake your head. “Did you know Tara thought we were dating?”

A smile begins at one corner of his mouth. “What?”

“Yeah.” Saying it aloud makes you unexpectedly shy. You push your hands deeper into your coat pockets. “Apparently everyone did.”

You expect him to laugh. You expect him to question the team’s observational abilities or reconstruct the evidence that led them there. Instead, the smile falters as something you cannot read moves through his expression, and for the first time all evening Spencer has nothing to say.

At the corner, he waits for the light with his hands in his coat pockets and his shoulders drawn in against the cold. The unfinished explanation about Rossi’s glasses hangs somewhere behind you.

“Spence?” You bump your arm against his. “Got really quiet there for a minute.”

He looks at you, then towards the signal as it changes. “Did you correct her?”

You start across the street beside him. “I tried. Then you came over.”

“What were you going to say?”

“That it wasn’t like that. That we weren’t…”

“Dating,” he supplies.

“Right.”

He nods, but the silence returns. You reach the other pavement and stop. Spencer takes one more step before noticing you are no longer beside him.

“What?” he asks.

“You’re being strange.”

“I’m not.”

“You abandoned a fact halfway through.”

“I can finish it.”

“I don’t want to hear about the glasses anymore.”

His eyebrows lift. “Then why did you bring them up?”

“Spencer.”

He goes still. For a moment he simply looks at you, his hair untidy from the wind, a nervous half-smile appearing and disappearing at the corner of his mouth. When he speaks, each word sounds measured.

“I didn’t realise it was that obvious.”

Your pulse stumbles. “What was?”

He doesn’t answer with words. His gaze holds yours, open enough that you can see the question he’s too careful to ask and the truth he has already let escape.

“Oh,” you say. Everything you have been turning over since Rossi’s house settles into place at once. Spencer is still watching you with nervous hope, and Tara’s mistake no longer feels entirely like one.

Spencer glances down at the wet pavement, then back at you, waiting.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want to lose you,” he says quietly, holding your gaze this time.

For several seconds, all you can do is stare at him. “Spencer, I rearranged my entire week so I could keep Thursdays free for you.”

He blinks. “You said Thursday was convenient.”

“It’s convenient. I made it convenient.”

“For me?” he asks, still sounding uncertain enough to make you want to shake him.

You let out a breath and catch the lapels of his coat. “Yes. For you.”

Then you pull him down and kiss him.

The first touch of your mouth to his goes awry only because Spencer inhales at exactly the wrong moment. His body stills beneath your hands. You feel the startled warmth of his breath, the edge of his lower lip and the smallest movement as he begins to respond — just before nerves get the better of you and you draw back.

His eyes stay closed for another second. When they open, he stares at you, lips parted.

“Because I wanted Thursdays with you,” you say, still holding his coat. “And because I think I’ve wanted to do that for longer than I realised.”

His gaze searches your face. “You’ve wanted this too?”

“Yes, Spence.”

Relief breaks across his face as one of his hands finds your waist, tentative only until you lean into it.

“Then why did you stop?” he asks.

A nervous laugh slips out. “You went completely still.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to kiss me.” His fingers curl into your coat and bring you a little closer. “I am now.”

You kiss him again.

This time Spencer meets you halfway. One hand settles against the side of your neck, his thumb fitting beneath your jaw, while the other draws you in at the waist. He kisses you slowly at first, learning the angle, and then with an eagerness that makes you smile against his mouth. His answering laugh is breathless, one you have never heard before and already know you will want to hear again.

When the cold finally makes itself impossible to ignore, you part only far enough to breathe. Spencer’s forehead rests against yours, his breath still unsteady.

“Garcia is going to be unbearable,” you whisper.

“She’s going to say she knew.”

“She did know.”

Spencer closes his eyes. “Please don’t tell her that.”

You laugh and smooth the curl the wind has dropped between his eyebrows. He catches your hand as you lower it, keeping your fingers curled inside his.

“Are Thursdays still mine?” he asks.

“They’re still yours.”

He keeps hold of your hand as you begin walking again, his thumb moving over your knuckles while his shoulder keeps brushing yours. He makes it almost half a block before speaking.

“Friday,” he says.

“What about it?”

“Are you free?”

“No.”

His disappointment is immediate. “Oh.”