The steady relentless drumming of the late June rain against the bedroom windowpane was the only sound anchoring the small apartment against the suffocating darkness of the night. It was a heavy rhythmic downpour, a solid wall of water that seemed to cut the two of you off from the rest of the world.

The storm masked the distant comforting hum of city traffic, wrapping the room in a thick, almost claustrophobic silence that felt heavy enough to breathe.

The blue flickering shadows of the lightning danced across the far walls, casting long skeletal shapes over the heavy down comforter and the two bodies tangled beneath it. Every few minutes, a low rumble of thunder would vibrate through the floorboards, a quiet tremor that passed through the mattress and settled deep into the quiet atmosphere of the room.

You lay perfectly still on your side, your eyes fully adjusted to the dimness, tracking the soft shallow rise and fall of Spencer’s chest.

Since he had returned home from the prison, true silence in this apartment was a rarity, an elusive luxury you both chased but rarely caught. Usually, his sleep was a fractured violent thing, a chaotic sequence of sudden jerks, muttered statistics and breathless gasps that would drag him awake in the dead of night, his heart hammering a frantic terrifying rhythm against your palms.

You had grown used to the way he would wake up drenched in a cold sweat, his hazel eyes wide and unseeing in the dark, searching the corners of the ceiling for guards or inmates that weren't there.

It had become your routine to hold him through those tremors, whispering his name like a mantra until his breathing leveled out and the ghosts of the cell block retreated back into the shadows of his mind.

Tonight he seemed deceptively peaceful, the harsh defensive walls he carried around during the day like a protective armor had softened slightly into the mattress. In the pale watery light of the storm, his handsome features looked younger, almost fragile, stripped of the heavy processing analytical mask he wore at the bureau.

The sharp tension that usually held his mouth in a tight guarded line had eased, his lips slightly parted as he drew in deep steady breaths yet even in the deepest depths of rest, the trauma of the past year lingered like a phantom weight, an unspoken presence that refused to leave the room.

You reached out, your fingertips hovering just millimeters away from his skin, mapping the sharp prominent line of his jaw and the faint permanent furrow between his brows that even sleep couldn't fully erase.

His broad shoulders -once relaxed and loose- were set with a faint rigid tension under the thin white cotton of his shirt, his muscles were tightly wound, his fingers curled into loose fists against the sheets as if his body was still subconsciously waiting for a klaxon to wail, a whistle to blow or a heavy iron door to slam shut.

It was a physical manifestation of a survival instinct that had been beaten into him, a reminder that while his body was free, a part of his mind was still locked behind those towering concrete walls.

A quiet aching tenderness swelled in your chest, a mixture of profound love and a fierce protective sorrow that often hit you when you watched him like this. Slowly and carefully, not to startle him, you closed the remaining distance between you.

You slid your body across the mattress until the warmth of your bare thighs pressed against his leg under the covers, offering a grounded real world anchor. You looped an arm over his waist, your hand resting gently over the steady comforting beat of his heart.

Pressing your nose into the crook of his neck, you inhaled deeply, filling your senses with his familiar comforting scent, a rich mix of old book pages, cedarwood and the clean distinct heat of his skin.

You let out a long quiet breath against his collarbone, letting your eyelids drop as his radiating warmth began to heavy your limbs. You finally allowed yourself to drift off into the dark secure in the cozy dangerous belief that the worst of his nightmares were behind him and that tonight, he was finally safe in your arms.

Deep beneath the surface of his skin, behind the quiet facade of his resting features, Spencer’s mind was drowning in a sensory overload of concrete, iron and blood.

In the dark twisted abyss of his subconscious, the gentle rhythmic patter of the rain outside the window transformed, bleeding into the deafening metallic echo of heavy cell doors slamming shut in a synchronized mocking cadence.

The sound vibrated through his skull, loud and real enough to make his ears ring, the air in his lungs grew thick, hot and stagnant, instantly reeking of harsh industrial bleach, stale sweat and the sharp unmistakable copper tang of dried blood.

He was back in the yard, the towering gray walls closed in on him from all sides, blotting out the sky, trapping him in a visual prison of shadow and stone.

The distant distorted shouting of correctional officers ordering inmates to the fence bled into the low predatory murmurs of the men circling him, their heavy boots scraping against the gravel in a terrifyingly familiar rhythm.

He could hear the clinking of chains, the heavy thud of a nightstick hitting a ribcage and the desperate breathless gasps of someone fighting for their life in a blind spot.

Suddenly, the dream fractured, the ambient noise cutting out into a dead hyper focused silence, a dark faceless silhouette lunged out of the shadow of the watchtower, moving with a blinding lethal speed straight toward his blind spot.

The glint of a homemade shank cut through the darkness, aimed directly for his throat. He tried to move, tried to calculate an escape route but his spine collided heavily with the cold unyielding chain link fence.

His escape routes were entirely cut off, his back pressed against the wire, the metal digging into his shoulder blades as the weapon came closer and closer.

In the real world, the hyper vigilant survival instincts that had been ruthlessly carved into Spencer's DNA during his time inside completely hijacked his physical form, bypassing his conscious mind entirely.

His eyes flew wide open in the dark room but they weren't the soft warm hazel eyes that looked at you with adoration over morning coffee or crinkled at the corners when he smiled, they were completely blank, unseeing and wild with a primal territorial panic.

Before a single breath could leave your lungs, his body moved with a terrifying speed that you had never seen in him before. With a sharp violent surge of raw strength, Spencer flipped your entire body onto your back.

The sudden brutal displacement knocked the wind right out of your lungs, your spine colliding heavily with the mattress as his massive heavy frame pinned you flat beneath him like an immovable mountain.

You didn't even have a split second to register the shock, let alone scream before his right hand snapped upward.

His fingers fisted ruthlessly into the roots of your hair at the nape of your neck, his grip tightening like an iron clamp, his knuckles digging into your scalp as he violently yanked your head back, forcing your chin up and exposing the delicate pulsing line of your throat to the cold air of the room.

At the exact same millisecond, his left hand crashed down over your wrists, gathering them together and pinning both of your arms above your head against the pillow, his grip a bruising crushing force that felt like steel manacles locking around your skin, cutting off your circulation and trapping you completely.

"Spencer!" You gasped, the sound choking into a broken wheeze in your throat as the sheer suffocating weight of his chest crushed down on your ribs, making it physically impossible for your lungs to expand.

You thrashed beneath him in total blind shock, your legs kicking instinctively against the heavy down comforter, trying to slide your hips out from under his locked heavy thighs but he was completely unyielding.

He didn't budge a single millimeter, his knees anchoring your lower body into the mattress while his upper body held you in a vice grip. He leaned down lower, his face hovering just inches from yours, his jaw set so hard the muscle in his cheek was violently ticking.

His breathing was coming in ragged animalistic snarls, his chest heaving wildly against your bare skin. He was looking straight through you, his pupils completely blown out and dark, staring at a ghost from the yard that wasn't there.

To his traumatized brain, your frantic struggles weren't the movements of the person he loved, they were the desperate lethal lunges of an inmate trying to take his life in the dark and his body was operating on pure unadulterated survival.

Panic, cold, sharp and overwhelming flooded your veins, replacing the peaceful afterglow of sleep with a terrifying adrenaline rush.

Your heart hammered a frantic erratic rhythm against your ribs, a wild thumping that you were certain he could feel through his chest as you looked up into the eyes of the stranger hovering over you.

The man above you had Spencer's face, Spencer's broad chest and Spencer's scent, but the spirit behind those eyes was entirely feral, locked away in a violent memory that you had no access to.

"Spencer! Please!" You cried out, your voice breaking into a raw frightened whimper as his fingers dug even deeper into the meat of your wrists, the pressure beginning to throb with a dull dangerous ache that made your bones protest.

The grip on your hair was so tight it brought tears to your eyes, the skin of your neck stretched taut, leaving you completely vulnerable beneath him.

You could feel the heat radiating off his body, a burning feverish warmth that felt entirely different from the comforting heat you had snuggled into just an hour ago.

He was rigid, his muscles locked like stone, every line of his body vibrating with the readiness to inflict violence to save himself.

You twisted your right hand violently, ignoring the sharp stinging friction of his skin against yours, refusing to let the paralyzing fear keep you still. Through a surge of pure desperate adrenaline, you managed to slide your hand through the gap of his fingers, wrenching your wrist free from his iron grip.

You didn't try to strike him and you didn't try to push him away, knowing that any aggressive movement would only confirm his delusion and make his survival instincts push harder, instead you brought your palm up, slapping it flat against his burning sweat slick cheek.

Your fingers cupped his jawline with as much force as you could muster, your thumb pressing firmly into his skin to anchor him to the present.

"Spencer! Spencer look at me! Look at my face, it's me!" You shouted into the dark, your voice a frantic commanding sob that cut sharply through the heavy silence of the bedroom and the drumming of the rain. "You're home! Spencer, look at my eyes! You're safe, you're in our bed! It's me!"

The sound of his own name, delivered not with the anger of a guard or the malice of an inmate but with the desperate terrified love of your voice seemed to bounce off the walls and strike something deep within his locked down consciousness. It was a frequency his trauma couldn't block out.

The terrifying blank veil in his hazel eyes suddenly shattered like brittle glass. He blinked once, twice, his focus violently shifting as the dark suffocating illusion of the prison yard evaporated into the thin air of the room.

The cold concrete walls vanished and the familiar contours of his own bedroom, the soft sheets and the blue light of the storm rushed back into his brain. His gaze focused, dropping down to finally take in the scene directly beneath him.

The realization hit him like a physical bone shattering collision.

He saw his own hand tangled violently in your hair, bending your neck at a painful unnatural angle. He saw his other hand bruising your left wrist against the pillow, his fingers clamped around you like a weapon.

He felt the frantic terrified trembling of your body beneath his weight, the way your chest was heaving for the air he was denying you and he saw the tears of pure shock leaking out of the corners of your eyes, tracking down into your hair.

The possessive defensive wall inside him dropped into an abyss of absolute sickening horror.

Spencer recoiled as if he had just touched a live electrical wire. He let go of your hair and your wrists instantly, a sharp strangled gasp ripping from his throat.

He scrambled backward across the mattress with a desperate frantic urgency, his long limbs tangling in the heavy down comforter as he practically threw his own body away from yours. He didn't stop until his spine collided heavily with the wooden headboard at the absolute furthest corner of the bed, his knees pulling tightly up into his chest as if he was trying to make himself as small as physically possible.

His chest heaved, a raw choked sob tearing out of his throat, the sound incredibly ugly, broken and hollow in the quiet room. He looked down at his own hands, his fingers trembling so violently he could barely hold them together.

He stared at his palms with total disgust, horror and a mounting unadulterated panic, seeing the faint immediate red marks his fingers had just left on your pale skin, the physical evidence of his own capability to hurt you.

"I'm… it's…" he stuttered, his voice a fractured breathy thread that sounded completely unraveled. He tucked his hands against his chest, folding them into his armpits as if trying to hide them from view, his face twisting in an expression of pure devastated self loathing. "I'm so sorry... baby I'm so sorry… I didn't mean to... I thought... I thought I was back inside... I thought they found me... I didn't mean to put my hands on you… I swear I didn't."

He didn't even look up at you, his head dropping heavily between his knees as another violent sob shook his entire frame, his broad shoulders trembling under his shirt.

He was hyperventilating now, his words tumbling out in a frantic unorganized stammer, the statistics and facts he usually used to calm himself completely useless against the raw agony of his guilt.

"Please don't look at me like that... please baby… I'm so sorry... so fuckin sorry... I almost hurt you... I almost killed you... I put my hands on you..."

Your own heart was still racing, the adrenaline slowly fading into a heavy aching sorrow as you watched him completely fall apart in the corner of the bed. The fear you had felt a moment ago evaporated entirely, replaced by a desperate maternal need to soothe the agonizing fracture in his mind and pull him back from the ledge of his own guilt.

You sat up slowly, your body aching slightly from the rough positioning but you ignored it, keeping your eyes locked on his shaking form. You slowly began to shift your weight, dragging your body across the mattress toward him, making sure your movements were loud and clear so you wouldn't startle him again.

"Spencer... it's okay," you whispered softly, your voice steady and sweet despite the tremor in your chest. You reached your hand out through the dark, stretching it across the space between you to touch his knee. "It was just a nightmare baby… I'm okay! Look at me, I'm right here… you didn't hurt me."

The moment your fingertips brushed the soft fabric of his sweatpants, Spencer flinched away violently, drawing his legs even tighter against his chest, twisting his body into the corner to avoid your touch as if your skin was burning iron.

"No! Don't... don't touch me!" He cried out, his voice cracking into a panicked defensive yelp that cut you like a knife. He pulled himself away until he was practically pressed into the drywall, his eyes wide and wild, staring at you with a terrifying new realization. "Don't come near me… please… I... I can't… I'm not safe… you saw what I just did… I'm not safe for you."

You froze, your hand hovering in the empty air between you, the coldness of the separation striking you right in the center of your chest. The distance between you was only a few feet of mattress but it felt like an uncrossable canyon.

Spencer wrapped his long arms around his knees, burying his face entirely in his shins, his shoulders shaking in the dark as the rain continued to slam ruthlessly against the windowpane. He completely closed himself off from you, refusing to look at your face, refusing to breathe the same air.

The heavy sickening realization setting in deep within his bones that the prison had changed him into something fundamentally broken, something feral, something dangerous.

The silence that settled over the bedroom was no longer peaceful, it was a thick unyielding wall built entirely out of his own suffocating guilt and the terrifying knowledge that he had become too dangerous to touch the only person he loved.

He stayed there, a silent weeping silhouette in the dark and as you slowly pulled your hand back to your chest.

You realized that the ghost of that prison cell had finally found a way inside your home and it was threatening to tear Spencer away from you entirely.

*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻

The progression from late spring to early June usually brought a vibrant warmth to the city, but inside the four walls of the apartment, the atmosphere had plunged into a permanent suffocating winter.

​A full week had dragged by since the night the bedroom walls had dissolved into a phantom prison yard, and with every passing day, the frost between you and Spencer had only thickened, hardening into a barrier that felt entirely impossible to breach.

​The most glaring monument to this self imposed exile was the living room couch, the heavy wool blanket you had thrown over the back of it months ago was now permanently unfurled, its edges creased from seven consecutive nights of Spencer burying his long frame into the narrow cushions.

​Leaving the bedroom behind each evening, he left your shared bed feeling massive, cold and entirely hollow.

​You would lie awake for hours on your side, staring at the untouched pristine expanse of the mattress beside you, the distant muffled creaks of the sofa springs in the next room, a constant painful reminder of the canyon he was widening between you.

​During the daylight hours, Spencer had turned the concept of physical boundaries into a clinical science. When you passed him his morning coffee mug, your fingers accidentally brushed against his knuckles for a mere fraction of a second. The reaction was instantaneous and devastating.

​Spencer flinched violently, his hand jerking back as if the skin of your fingertips was a searing hot iron. He nearly dropped the ceramic mug, his grip tightening around the handle until his knuckles turned a bloodless white.

​"Sorry," he muttered, the word clipped, low and entirely devoid of its usual melodic honey. He didn't look up, his voice sounding like it was being forced through a tight restricted throat. "I’m sorry, just... clumsy."

​He wouldn't look you in the eye, not when you asked him how he slept, not when you tried to strike up a conversation about a book he was reading, and certainly not when you were in the same room.

​He hid behind his work with a desperate manic intensity as the dining room table had been completely swallowed by a chaotic mountain of closed case files, psychological profiles and behavioral assessments.

​Spencer sat there for hours on end, his posture stiff, rigid and completely guarded, his broad shoulders hunched over the paperwork like a shield designed to keep you out.

​He looked entirely exhausted, a shell of the man who had crawled into bed with you a week ago. The dark violet circles bruised into the delicate skin beneath his eyes had grown deep and hollow, casting gaunt shadows over his cheekbones.

​His hair was a wild unkempt mess, the curls tangled from the restless hours he spent tossing and turning on the couch.

​You knew him well enough to calculate the math he was running in his head, every hour he stayed awake was an hour he couldn't have an episode, every cup of black coffee he forced down his throat was a preventative measure against his own subconscious.

​He was starving his body of rest because he genuinely believed that the moment his eyelids closed, he became a lethal weapon, a monster waiting to snap in the dark.

​You would watch him from the doorway of the living room, watching the manic frantic way his fingers gripped his pen, the way his breath would occasionally catch in a ragged hitch if you moved too quickly or made a sudden sound.

​He was jumping at his own shadow, hyper vigilant and entirely wound tight, a ticking time bomb of repressed trauma and self loathing.

​The complete deprivation of his touch was making your skin feel hyper sensitive, a restless aching hunger settling into your bones.

​You missed the heavy grounding weight of his hands on your waist, the possessive deep rumbles of his voice against your ear when he was relaxed, and the absolute safety of being held so tightly against his chest that there wasn't a whisper of space between you.

​Now you were living with a beautiful tragic stranger who looked through you, around you, anywhere but at you, treating you like a fragile piece of glass he was terrified of shattering if he breathed too hard.

​The silence in the apartment was becoming completely unlivable, the pressure in the rooms building to a dangerous suffocating peak as the late night hours began to roll in once again.

​The clock on the nightstand ticked past midnight, its steady clinical rhythm counting down the final agonizing moments of another day lost to the ice.

​In the dim ambient shadows of the bedroom, the atmosphere felt impossibly thick, charged with a heavy lingering silence that had been building for seven straight days. It was a pressure cooker of unspoken words and repressed grief.

​You sat on the edge of the large empty mattress, your knees pulled up slightly, watching the doorway. A moment later, the quiet familiar sound of Spencer’s shuffling footsteps echoed against the hardwood floor.

​He moved like a ghost, his tall gaunt frame silhouetted by the pale moonlight as he crossed the frame of the door. He didn't intend to stop, but as he passed, you shifted against the sheets, the soft fabric rustling in the dead quiet of the apartment.

​Spencer froze instantly, his hyper vigilant posture stiffening into defensive rigidity.

​He purposefully, deliberately kept his eyes glued to the floorboards, treating the mattress like a crime scene he was forbidden from contaminating. The tight set of his jaw proved he knew exactly where you were sitting. He let out a slow shallow breath, trapped in the doorway, caught between the urge to run and the agonizing reality that you were awake.

​"Goodnight," he murmured, his voice a flat mechanical whisper that barely carried across the room. It was the same hollow scripted sign off he had used every single night this week.

​He immediately began to turn away, his shoulder shifting to shield his exit as he prepared to retreat to the safety of the couch.

​Something inside you violently snapped. The endless freezing nights, the clinical avoidance in the kitchen, the agonizing memory of him flinching away from the mere ghost of your touch, it all rushed to the surface, boiling over into a hot volatile surge of pure unadulterated frustration and blinding loneliness.

​Before your brain could even process the impulse, you lunged off the bed, your bare feet slapped loudly against the hardwood floor as you crossed the room in three blind frantic strides.

​Spencer didn't even have time to react before you stepped directly into his path, your smaller frame completely blocking the narrow hallway. You threw your shoulders back, physically anchoring yourself in front of him like an unyielding wall.

​"No," you breathed, your voice raw, trembling and vibrating with an intensity that cut through the room like a blade. "No Spencer, you're not sleeping on that couch tonight."

​Spencer froze instantly, the sudden aggressive blockage of his path sending a visible tremor through his long frame. Slowly and painfully, he forced his head up, his hazel eyes flickering behind the thick glass of his lenses, finally clashing directly into yours.

​"Sweetheart please," he muttered, his jaw ticking violently, a small muscle in his cheek twitching with the immense effort it was taking to keep his composure from unraveling. He took a deliberate heavy step backward, trying to reestablish the clinical safety distance. "Go back to bed, it’s late and I’m... I’m tired… I need to lie down."

​"I don't care how late it is!" You snapped, stepping right with him, refusing to give him an inch of the separation he was begging for. The tears you had been suppressing for days finally spilled over your lower lashes, tracking hot and fast down your cheeks. "And don't you dare lie to me and tell me you're going to sleep out there! You aren't sleeping at all Spencer! Look at you! You're completely destroying yourself and you're destroying us, because you're terrified to close your eyes!"

​"I'm managing my symptoms based on a structured behavioral regression model," he stammered out, his voice rising slightly, the clinical jargon slipping out of his mouth like a desperate shield to keep his emotions contained. "Statistically, the probability of a secondary night terror episode decreases dramatically if the sensory triggers of the shared environment are-”

​"Stop it! Stop running behind the math Spencer! I don't want the statistics!" You screamed, your voice breaking into a ragged desperate sob that echoed loudly down the dark hallway. "I don't care about the models! I miss my boyfriend! I miss the man who holds me until I fall asleep! You're abandoning me Spencer! You're letting your guilt punish both of us!"

​"I'm protecting you!" Spencer suddenly shouted back, his voice completely losing its calm intellectual edge and dropping into a deep jagged guttural octave that sounded like it was being violently dragged over broken gravel.

​The fragile artificial composure he had spent a week manufacturing didn't just crack, it entirely shattered into a million pieces. He stepped forward, his massive towering height looming over you in the dark hallway, his entire body vibrating with a desperate self loathing agony.

​"How can you stand there and say I'm punishing you?" He yelled, his eyes wide, wild and swimming with a thick veil of tears that finally broke, spilling down his pale cheeks. His voice caught in a raw choked sob, his face twisting into an expression of pure devastating self loathing. “I'm terrified of myself! Do you understand me? I'm completely terrified of what I’ve become! I woke up in the dark and my hands were tangled in your hair! My body was pinning you down and I was choking the breath out of your lungs that I almost killed you! The person I love more than my own life... I treated you like an inmate trying to murder me in the yard…"

​He looked completely defenseless, his long frame caving inward as his trembling hands flew up to cover his face.

​"I'm a monster," he wept openly now, his chest hitching in a frantic hyperventilating rhythm as he backed up until his spine slammed into the drywall of the hallway. "I came out of that place with a sickness in my head and it’s… dangerous. How can you want me near you? How can you look at me and want me in that bed when you know that if I close my eyes..."

​The raw bleeding vulnerability of his confession stripped away the last of your frustration, leaving behind nothing but a profound wave of absolute devotion. You didn't hesitate for a single millisecond, you bridged the final agonizing distance between your bodies and stepped directly into his personal space.

​"Spencer," you whispered, your voice a fierce steady vow that refused to let him sink any deeper into his own darkness.

​Before he could flinch, before he could recalculate his coordinates or throw up another psychological wall, you reached out and grabbed both of his trembling sweat slick hands.

​He tried to pull away, his muscles tensing as a panicked gasp left his lips, but you held on with a surprising strength of your own. You forced his long shaking fingers open, flattening his large palms directly against your body, one hand locked firmly over the frantic rapid fire beating of your heart and the other pressed flat against the bare burning skin of your waist.

​"Look at me," you commanded softly, forcing him to meet your gaze through his tears. "I don't care about the nightmares Spencer, I don't care about the prison and I don't care about the scars or the survival instincts. I know exactly who you're… you're my man and you could never be a monster to me."

​You squeezed his wrists, pressing his palms heavier into your skin, letting him feel the real warm pulsing evidence of your life beneath his fingers.

​"I'm not afraid of you, I will never be afraid of you. I don't need a perfectly safe clinical apartment Spencer... I just need you, all of you, even the dark parts so please... stop running away from me."

​The heavy agonizing dam that Spencer had constructed out of his suffocating guilt, his clinical evaluations and his endless exhausting self loathing didn’t just crack under the weight of your words, it shattered into absolute nothingness.

​The moment his bare trembling palms registered the real radiating warmth of your skin, the last remaining shred of his discipline dissolved into a desperate feral hunger. A low jagged sound tore from deep within his chest, a raw groan of pure undisputed defeat that vibrated right through your own ribs.

​"Baby… please," he choked out, his voice cracking violently as his forehead crashed down against yours, his eyes closing tight as if the physical sensation of your skin was a shock to his entire nervous system. "Don't say that, don't say you aren't afraid of me when I'm... when I'm falling apart like this."

​"I'm not," you cried, your fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt at his waist, pulling him closer. "I'm not afraid of you Spencer… I love you."

​He didn't hesitate for another microsecond, he didn't run a single statistic in his head, and he didn't let the terrifying ghosts of the prison cell block dictate his movements for a single second longer. His hands suddenly locked onto your waist, claiming what he had starved himself of for seven endless freezing days.

​With a sudden violent surge of long denied possessiveness, he yanked your entire frame forward, lifting you completely off your feet and spinning you around in one fluid heavy motion. Before you could even register the sudden shift in gravity, Spencer ruthlessly slammed your back straight into the narrow hallway wall.

​"Tell me again," he demanded frantically, his voice a dark unhinged rasp that vibrated directly against your lips as he hovered millimeters away, his hands anchoring your hips back into the wall so hard your spine arched. "Tell me you want me… say it baby... please."

​"I need you," you sobbed out, your hands flying up to wrap securely around his neck, your fingers tangling deep into his curls. "I need you so bad Spenc-"

​The last syllable of his name hadn't even fully left your lips before he completely cut you off, crashing his mouth down onto yours. It wasn't a calculated or a gentle touch, it was a bruising desperate collision of lips and teeth, a messy starved reclamation that tasted of salt, tears and pure intoxicating heat.

​He bit at your lower lip, his tongue forcing its way past your teeth with a rough demanding stroke that made a soft helpless whimper slip from your throat.

​He broke the kiss for a mere fraction of a second just to draw a ragged burning lungful of air, but immediately surged right back in, capturing your mouth again, his tongue tangling with yours in a deep wet frantic rhythm that left you entirely breathless.

​Without letting an inch of space come between your bodies, he hooked his hands under your thighs, hoisting you up around his waist and carrying you directly over the threshold into the dark shadowed sanctuary of the bedroom, walking blind until your bodies tumbled together onto the center of the mattress.

​He began to rain hot heavy kisses all over the damp flushed skin of your face, his mouth moving frantically, tracing the sharp line of your jaw, pressing deep lingering marks into the sensitive skin beneath your ear before surging upward to press heavy wet kisses onto your fluttering tear stained eyelids.

​"I… I missed you... I missed you so much, it was killing me," he gasped against your neck, his chest heaving violently against yours. “I’m so sorry sweetheart... I'm so sorry for leaving you in the dark... please just let me taste you… I can’t handle another second of not having you. I tried to stay away, I swear I tried… but I'm losing my mind without you."

​"Don't stay away again," you pleaded, arching your neck to give his mouth more room. "Don't ever go back to that couch Spencer."

​"Never," he swore against your skin, his teeth grazing your collarbone just hard enough to send a wild electric shudder straight down your spine. "Never again, I promise you… just let me have you."

​His hands slid from your waist down to your thighs, his fingers hooking under the fabric of your shorts and dragging them downward with a reckless tearing force. He shoved you backward until you were flat on your back in the center of the bed, looming over you with his eyes dark, blown out and completely wild.

​He reached down, his long fingers tangling into your hair at the sides of your head, pinning you to the pillow so you couldn't look away.

​"Look at me," he commanded, his voice dropping into a deep gravelly rasp, his thumbs stroking your cheekbones, wiping away the fresh tears. "Tell me you're ready for me... I need to hear it doll, I need to hear that you aren't afraid of what I'm about to do to you."

​"I want you to touch me," you breathed, your voice breaking into a ragged sob as your hands framed his sharp jaw. "I'm not afraid Spencer… please… just take me."

​"You're so good to me," he whispered, slamming his mouth down onto yours one more time in a deep desperate lingering kiss before sliding backward, dropping down to his knees at the foot of the bed.

​His hands slid down the length of your bare legs, his fingers wrapping tightly around your ankles before he ruthlessly hauled your body down the mattress until your hips were perfectly aligned with the edge, completely open before him.

​"Look at you," he whispered, his voice dropping into a deep gravelly rasp that vibrated right through the floorboards. His knuckles slowly, deliberately traced the sensitive skin of your inner thighs. "A full week of me sleeping on that couch, a full week of me treating you like you were made of glass and you’re already so wet for me. Tell me you missed my hands on you… tell me."

​"I did," you gasped out, your hips twitching under his touch. "I missed you so much Spencer."

​"I know baby, I know," he murmured, his hands sliding flat against the soft flesh of your inner thighs, mapping the contours of your skin as he stroked upward from your knees to your hips with a slow deliberate pressure.

​"You have no idea what it did to me… seeing you every day and not being able to touch you," he whispered, leaning over your legs as his long curls brushed against your shins, lowering his head to press a slow lingering kiss to the soft flesh of your knee. "Seven days of watching you move through this apartment, starving for you... I'm so sorry I made you feel abandoned."

​He slid his hands higher, slowly parting your legs, pressing his lips to the middle of your right thigh, his breath hot and damp against your skin. He shifted his grip, anchoring onto your thighs with a firm unyielding pressure, exposing your center to the pale light.

​Your hips twitched instinctively, a soft whimper escaping your lips as his mouth crept closer.

​The first touch of his mouth was an agonizingly slow calculated press of his warm lips against the hyper sensitive crease of your hip. He hovered there, his hot heavy breath fanning over your swollen center, before parting your folds with the flat tip of his tongue, sliding it with excruciating slowness from the very bottom of your cunt all the way up to the hyper sensitive peak of your clit.

​"Spencer! Oh god... Spencer," you cried out, your spine instantly arching off the mattress as your fingers fisted blindly into the bunched up sheets on either side of your head.

​"Do you like that baby?" He muttered against your wet skin, his voice dripping with authority. "Tell me how it feels, let me hear you say it."

​"It feels so good... please… don't stop," you begged, your voice tight and strained.

​He leaned in completely, his lips sealing over your swollen pulsing folds. He abandoned all gentleness, his tongue shifting into a relentless rhythm that drove you entirely out of your mind. He flattened his tongue against your clit, tracing tight, agonizingly perfect circles around the nerve endings while simultaneously using his lips to suck the sensitive peak deep into the heat of his mouth.

​The wet rhythmic sounds of his mouth against your flesh echoed loudly through the quiet bedroom. You tossed your head from side to side on the pillow, a continuous stream of fractured gasps slipping from your lips.

​Suddenly, the distance became too much for him even down there. Spencer surged up the length of your body, pinning your torso flat against the mattress with his chest as he smashed his wet, slick mouth right back onto yours. The kiss was chaotic and loud, his tongue driving into your mouth, forcing you to taste your own sweetness on his lips.

​"You taste so good... so sweet," Spencer muttered right against your lips, pulling back just an inch to look down into your glazed eyes. His lips were completely smeared with your internal wetness, glittering in the blue moonlight. "Look at how much you're leaking for me. You like what I'm doing to you sweetheart?"

​"Yes!... S’much," you cried out, your hands gripping his shoulders desperately. "It's yours… please... "

​"Good girl," he growled, before sliding back down between your thighs to finish what he started.

​He drove his tongue back into your heat, his pace accelerating into something desperate and frantic. He flattened his tongue and slid it deep inside your opening before curling it upward to stroke your internal walls, while his thumb pressed firmly against your clit to keep the external stimulation reaching a feverish unbearable pitch.

​You were completely trapped beneath the unyielding weight of his shoulders, your legs held wide open, forced to endure the absolute mastery of his mouth. Every single flick of his tongue felt like a lightning strike straight to your nervous system.

​"Spencer… please!... I… Ahh!~... I'm gonna... I'm gonna cum… please… I can't take it!" You screamed, your fingers tearing at the pillowcases as your pelvis violently trembled against his face.

​"That's it… arch for me you slut," he growled against your skin, his thumbs digging into your hips, tilting your pelvis higher to meet his mouth. "Give it all to me, cum for me doll… come on!"

​He delivered three fast blunt merciless suctions directly on your hyper sensitive peak, paired with a deep slide of his tongue inside your tight opening, and the dam inside you violently broke.

​A sharp shattered wail tore from your throat, your entire body going completely rigid on the mattress as a massive messy orgasm crashed over you. Your internal muscles seized in violent spasms, milking the empty air as your release poured out of you in hot pulsing waves.

​Spencer didn't pull back for a single second. With a dark feral snarl of pure victory, he drove his face even deeper into your soaking heat, his tongue working frantically to lap up every single drop of your release, drinking down your climax until your hips were trembling so violently you completely collapsed back into the sheets, gasping for air.

​He stayed on his knees for a long heavy beat, his chest rising and falling violently, his lips wet and smeared with the shimmering evidence of your surrender. When he finally lifted his head, his hazel eyes were gone, the pupils completely blown out into two dark bottomless voids of pure unadulterated territorial hunger.

​Spencer stood up from the edge of the bed, his movements fluid, frantic and filled with a singular purpose. His eyes never left your glazed face as his fingers flew to the drawstring of his sweatpants, untying and kicking them away in a single swift motion, stripping out of his clothes with a trembling speed.

​In the pale light, your eyes traced the stark jagged lines of the prison scars on his skin, the faded lingering bruises on his ribs and the intense rigid set of his spine, but there was no fear left in your chest. His length was fully erect, thick and throbbing with a heavy pulse against his lower abdomen, completely slick with a heavy drop of precum that caught the blue light of the room.

​He didn't say a word as he crawled back over you, moving up the mattress like a predator, his large frame blocking out the bedroom. He collapsed down against your chest, his arms winding tightly around your neck as he buried his face in your hair, a fractured sobbing gasp leaving his lips.

​"I can't breathe without you," he whispered frantically, his voice cracking as his lips blindly sought yours in the dark. He caught your mouth in a wet heavy bruising tangle of tongues, his teeth grazing your lips as he drank down your whimpers. "Talk to me doll… please… let me know you're right here with me."

​"I love you Spencer," you sobbed out, arching your neck as his mouth slid down to press a hot heavy kiss to your jawline. "Spencer please… I need you inside me right now… look at how much I want you."

​"You're so good to me… my girl… my good sweet girl."

​He slid down your body, his hands locking onto your waist, his fingers sinking deep into your hips. He anchored you down, tilting your pelvis upward. The second his length lined up with your entrance, all of Spencer’s legendary intellect stripped away, leaving behind a man driven by sheer primitive starvation.

​He didn't ease into you, he didn't give your body a second to adjust. With a brutal desperate thrust of his hips, Spencer buried himself to the absolute hilt inside your soaking heat in one single bottoming surge.

​A high shattered scream tore straight from your throat, your spine arching off the mattress as your vision sparked white at the blunt massive depth of him. The stretch was instantaneous and suffocating, your internal walls throwing up a violent frantic grip around his shaft as your cervix absorbed the full heavy impact of his pelvis.

​Spencer let out a broken ragged groan that vibrated right through your chest. His composure completely failed, his massive frame collapsing flat on top of you, smothering your cries with hot messy desperate kissed.

​His tongue drove deep into your mouth, tangling with yours in a wet starved rhythm while his hands flew to the sides of your face, his fingers digging into your hair to pin you to the pillow.

​"Tell me you're real," he rasped frantically, pulling back a millimeter, his hazel eyes wide, dark and completely unhinged as his chest heaved against yours. "Sweetheart please... say my name, tell me I'm not hurting you... tell me you're right here."

​"Spencer... Ahhh~... please," you sobbed out, your hands clawing at his back, your nails digging into his skin as your hips twitched beneath his heavy weight. "I'm right here... I'm real... I'm yours... please move."

​"You're so tight... so warm... so perfect for me," he whimpered against your lips, his jaw setting into a hard ruthless line as he pulled back just an inch before slamming his hips forward again.

​He set a punishing relentless pace right out of the gate, establishing a deep heavy rhythm that echoed loudly off the dark bedroom walls. Every upward surge drove him deep into your core, his thick head hitting your internal sweet spot with a terrifying mechanical precision that sent white hot shocks of pleasure straight to your brain.

​He was completely unraveled, operating on pure instinct. His mouth left yours, sliding down the wet flushed column of your neck to press hot heavy frantic kisses into your skin. He bit down gently on the sensitive pulse point at your throat, his teeth grazing your flesh just hard enough to draw a soft whimper from your lips before his tongue lapped over the mark, soothing the sting with wet possessive strokes.

​"I spent seven days staring at this neck," he growled, his voice a dark gravelly rasp against your skin as his thrusts grew faster, harder, more reckless. "Seven days on that couch calculating every inch of your body in my head, going fuckin insane because I couldn't put my mouth right here."

​He dragged his lips down further, trailing heavy scalding kisses over your collarbone, his long fingers sliding down to grip your waist with an iron pressure that left dark marks on your hips. He hoisted one of your legs higher, draping your thigh over his hip, opening your core at an agonizingly sharp angle that let him penetrate you even deeper.

​The blunt friction was overwhelming, the sheer volume of his length stretch printing itself into your flesh until you were tossing your head side to side on the pillow, completely out of your mind.

​"Spencer... I can't... it's too much!" You cried out, your fingers tangling deep into his messy curls, pulling his head down.

​Instead of slowing down, Spencer dropped his mouth down to your bare chest. He took one swollen sensitive nipple into his mouth, his tongue swirling around the peak before sucking it deep into the wet heat of his throat.

​A sharp shattered wail ripped from your lungs as the dual sensation of his mouth on your breast and his heavy hips slamming into your cunt short circuited your nervous system. And before you could even adjust to it, his thumb reached down between your bodies, finding your swollen clit and pressing flat against it, grinding in tight agonizing circles in time with his deep thrusts.

​"Look at what you do to me," Spencer rasped against your wet skin, his breath burning hot as his tongue flicked over your nipple, making you writhe violently beneath him. "Look at how easy you break for your man. You're milking me so hard... squeezing me so tight I can barely breathe."

​"I'm... g-gonna... Ahhh!~... gonna cum... Spencer please!" You screamed, your internal muscles clenching down around his shaft in frantic rapid fire contractions.

​"Cum with me sweetheart," he growled, his voice cracking with pure emotion as he felt your release building. He accelerated his pace into a frantic unhinged blur, his pelvis slamming against yours with a wet heavy thud, his tongue driving back into your mouth to swallow your cries. "Cum for me... do it baby... please!"

​The climax you both like a physical collision, a violent wave of blinding pleasure that locked your entire frame rigid. Your internal walls seized around him, pulsing in heavy desperate spasms, and the helpless suction of your climax instantly dragged Spencer right over the edge with you.

​With a raw shattered roar that tore from deep within his chest, Spencer drove himself to the absolute hilt one last time, his body going rigged above you as he unloaded a thick burning wave of his release deep inside your core.

​His forehead crashed against yours, his entire frame shaking violently as he poured himself into you, his mouth locked onto yours in a deep messy suffocating kiss that drank down every single breath you had left.

​You both lay there for a brief breathless second, chest to chest, gasping for air as the room spun in a heavy overstimulated haze, but Spencer didn't pull out. He couldn't.

​The physical sensation of your warm internal walls still throbbing around his length, paired with the sheer overwhelming relief of having you in his arms, sent another surge of wild desperate need straight to his brain. He was still rock hard inside you, his pulse throbbing heavily against your cervix.

​"I... I can't... I need more," he gasped against your lips, his hazel eyes blown out, completely dark with a territorial hunger that knew no limit. "I'm sorry baby... I'm so sorry... I can't stop... I need you more... I need all of you."

​Before you could even draw a full breath, Spencer tightened his grip on your hips and slammed forward again. A high broken gasp left your lips as he immediately reestablished a fast brutal rhythm, his thrusts coming harder, faster and far more unhinged than before.

​He was completely relentless, taking advantage of your overstimulated hyper sensitive state, driving his length deep into your soaking cunt with a heavy possessive force that rattled the headboard against the wall.

​"Spencer!... Hahh-ahh~... I just- Please!" You sobbed out, your hands framing his sharp jaw, your thumbs wiping away the sweat slicked on his cheekbones. "It's too much... it feels... too good!"

​"Good," he growled, his mouth sliding down to map your jawline, pressing deep lingering wet marks into your skin before moving down to capture your other nipple between his teeth, grazing it just hard enough to make your hips buck mindlessly against his. "I want you so wet you're leaking all over my thighs... I want you so ruined you can't even think about anyone else."

​He slid his hands beneath your lower back, arching your spine off the mattress, lifting your hips so every single thrust hit your internal sweet spot with brutal efficiency. His mouth moved feverishly all over your body, kissing your neck, your shoulders, your chest, his tongue leaving a slick burning trail over your skin.

​"Look at you taking every single inch of me," he rasped, his breath hot and ragged as his pace turned wild, his thrusts losing all order as he chased his second climax. "You're so sweet doll... so tight... so perfect for me... tell me you feel me deep inside you... tell me whose cock is filling you up."

​"Yours... yours Spencer!... Please!" You wailed, your spine arching impossibly high as a second, even more violent wave of pleasure began to coil deep in your lower abdomen, building so fast your lungs couldn't keep up.

​"That's right sweetheart," he snarled, his voice dropping into a deep guttural octave that vibrated straight through your ribs. He slammed his mouth back onto yours, his tongue thrusting deep in tandem with his heavy hips, driving you ruthlessly over the precipice. "Take it all... give it to me... cum again for me please!"

​The second orgasm crashed over you like a tidal wave, far more intense and messy than the first, your internal muscles locking around his shaft in a violent vice like grip.

​The sheer force of your second climax completely broke Spencer. With a dark feral snarl, he shoved himself as deep as physically possible, his hips pinned flat against yours as a second massive white hot release tore through his body.

​He shook uncontrollably on top of you, groaning your name into the crook of your neck as he flooded your core once more, holding you down until the very last drop was spent and both of your bodies collapsed completely limp onto the sheets.

​Spencer stayed right where he was, buried deep for a long heavy minute, his frame anchoring you flat against the soft sheets. His forehead pressed firmly against yours, his long damp curls falling like a curtain around your faces as his chest heaved against yours.

​There was no panic left in his hazel eyes now.

​He slowly, carefully slid his length out of your body, but as a soft breathless whimper left your lips, he immediately dragged his long limbs around you, refusing to let an inch of cold air settle between your bodies.

​"Stay still sweetheart," he whispered a moment later, returning from the bathroom with a warm damp washcloth. "Give me just a second okay?"

​He knelt back onto the mattress, his movements slow and gentle as he began the tender ritual of cleaning you, wiping away the slick evidence of your climaxes with a feather soft touch.

​When the pale blue moonlight illuminated the dark violet fingerprint bruises his iron grip had left on the soft flesh of your hips, Spencer froze, but this time he didn't recoil.

​He dropped the cloth and leaned down, pressing a soft lingering open mouthed kiss directly over the darkest bruise. He stayed there for a long moment before sliding over to kiss the next mark, and then the next, mapping every single shadow his hands had made.

​"I've got you," he murmured against your skin, his voice thick with an emotional weight that made your eyes well with fresh tears. "I've got you baby, you're so safe with me, I promise you."

​He gently guided your arms through the sleeves of his clean favorite shirt, pulling the soft fabric over your head before sliding under the heavy comforter. He reached out his arms, wrapping them securely around your waist and hauling you until you were lying completely on top of him, your chest flat against his sternum and your legs tangled with his.

​You let out a long shuddering sigh of pure contentment, burying your face in the warm pulsing hollow of his throat.

​Spencer rested his chin on top of your head, his long fingers mindlessly drawing slow soothing circles into the fabric covering your spine.

​As you both finally began to drift off into a heavy sleep, the lingering terror of the past week completely evaporated into the shadows. The cold ice wall had dissolved, replaced entirely by a deep soul shaking certainty.

​As you listened to the steady uninterrupted beat of Spencer's heart beneath your cheek, you knew the prison yard no longer held any power over this room. You were exactly where you belonged, locked safely in the arms of the man who loved you.

Decision made, you opened the door slowly. You expected him to be asleep, but instead you were met with Spencer reading, his back resting against the backboard, the room only illuminated by the lamp in the corner of the room. 

He didn’t say anything, just watched as you walked to the stand at the end of the bed, his eyes greedily taking you in, sweeping up and down. 

You kept your eyes fixed on his as you slowly started to peel your top off your body over your head, throwing it on the ground with little regard. 

Spencer sat his book aside, his eyes never leaving yours as he sat up a little straighter. 

You tucked your thumbs under the waistband of your skirt, pulling it down antagonisingly slowly. Spencer swallowed and his eyes widened as it hit the floor with a small thump. 

Despite seeing you naked on numerous occasions, he never seemed to take it for granted. He always looked at you like it was the first time. 

You carried on until you were completely bare in front of him, taking your hairclip out to allow your hair to fall free. Spencer's hands flexed at his sides momentarily. 

You crawled towards him deliberately slowly, your hair falling over one shoulder.  His hand came up to touch your arm, you swatted it away. 

Leaning in close to his face, your lips inches away from his, you whispered. “Are you going to be good for me?” 

“Yes” he stammered out, voice thick and shaky. Nodding as he spoke. 

You loved when Spencer took the reins, when he pounded into you and made you cum over and over again, but it took little real investigation to know that this side was within him. You saw it in the way you would grip his hair, bite him, stick your thumb in his mouth. 

“Good boy” you say. “Lie flat” 

Spencer listened to your command with no obligation, sliding down the headboard and resting his head on his pillow. 

You made your way further up his body until your knees sat either side of his head, his hands automatically resting on your thighs. You put one hand on the headboard, the other threading through his hair. 

Spencer didn't hesitate. He surged upward, his tongue darting out to swipe a long, wet stroke all the way up to your clit. You gasped, your fingers tightening in his hair, pulling his head firmly against you. 

He began to lap at you with a feverish pace, his tongue flat and broad, tasting every drop of your arousal. He groaned into your folds, the sound vibrating through your entire body, as he used his lips to suck your clit into his mouth, pulling and swirling it with a rhythmic intensity.

You arched your back, your hand gripping the headboard for leverage as he worked. He was thorough, his tongue flicking rapidly against your most sensitive spot while his hands squeezed your thighs, anchoring you to him. 

He was eating you like he were starving, his nose buried in your scent, making wet, sloppy sounds that filled the quiet room.

You could feel the tension building in your lower belly, the familiar coil of an orgasm tightening. As you felt the first wave of your climax hit, you pushed yourself down harder against his face, muffling his moans with your wetness. 

You shuddered, your internal muscles pulsing violently against his tongue as you came, a loud, unrestrained moan escaping your lips. Spencer didn't pull away. 

Even as you trembled, he continued to lick and suck, cleaning every drop of your come from your skin with a devotion that bordered on worship.

Once the tremors subsided, you slowly lifted yourself off him, leaving him breathless and glistening. You looked down at him, a smirk playing on your lips.

You reached your hand down between both your bodies to rub his cock through his boxers. He whined, leaning forward to try to kiss you. 

Tutting, you leaned back, sly smile on your face. “Nuh Uh” 

You slipped your fingers underneath his waistband and pulled them off quickly. Leaving his cock aching and twitching in the cool air. 

You watched him squirm beneath you, his hips twitching instinctively as you avoided the very thing he was craving. Every kiss you pressed into his inner thigh or the soft skin of his hip made him gasp, his breath hitching in a desperate rhythm. He was a taut string, vibrating with a need so intense it was almost tangible in the air between you.

Finally, you looked up at him, your eyes hooded, seeing the sheer agony of desire etched into his features. His cock was fully erect, a thick, pulsing vein running along the side, leaking a bead of pre-cum that glistened under the dim light of the lamp.

Without a word, you leaned in and swiped your tongue along the length of him, from the base all the way to the head, groaning at the taste of the salt and musk of him. 

Spencer let out a strangled moan, his head slamming back against the pillow, his fingers curling into the bedsheets.

You opened your mouth and took him in, sliding your lips over the head of his cock with a wet, sloppy sound. 

You didn't just suck; you focused your attention on the sensitive underside, the frenulum, flicking your tongue rapidly against the most nerve-dense part of him. 

You swirled your tongue around the rim, creating a vacuum of heat and moisture that made him shudder violently.

"Please," he whimpered, his voice a broken rasp.

You ignored his plea, increasing the pace. You took him deeper, your throat tightening around him, while your tongue continued to tease and lash at the underside of his shaft. 

Spencer was losing it. His thighs trembled, and his hips began to buck upward, driven by a primal urge to thrust into your mouth. But as soon as he moved too much, you paused, pulling back just an inch and giving him a warning look. 

He froze instantly, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and glazed. He stayed still, enduring the exquisite torture of your mouth, his hands gripping the comforter so hard his knuckles were white.

You went back to work, becoming even more precise, using your tongue to work in small, frantic circles on the underside, driving him closer and closer to the edge. He was twitching now, his entire body humming with tension, his breath coming in short and jagged. 

Just when he was teetering on the edge, you pulled back completely with a smirk. Releasing him with a soft, wet pop. 

Spencer's eyes remained completely screwed shut, his hips shifting and twitching, trying to fight back his orgasm. You had never thought he had looked more beautiful. You wanted to end his torture, but you didn’t. You both knew the end result would be better off if you prolonged. 

“You can only come when I tell you you can” You say as you straddle his lap, placing your hands flat against his chest. 

He whined at your words, but nodded anyway. You took his hands and placed them above his head.

“Don’t move your hands. If you do, I’ll have to punish you” 

The words that left your mouth surprised you. Being this horny apparently turned you into some sort of succubus. Perhaps your version of Spencer's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 

You angled your hips just right, so his cock rested at your entrance. You pushed down until only his tip entered, leaving it inside for one brief moment to pull back. You repeated this process until Spencer was a blubbering mess beneath you, whining and twitching with impatience. 

His hands still remained above his head throughout it all, you rewarded his good behaviour with a kiss and finally sinking down all the way to the hilt. 

Your head lazily rolled all the way around as you groaned, feeling impossibly full from him. He was always the perfect fit, nothing could ever compare. Perhaps that was one of the reasons no matter what you said, there would never be a last time. 

You stayed still for a moment, savoring the friction and the sheer heat of his cock buried deep inside. Spencer let out a sound that was half-sob, half-groan, his chest heaving beneath your palms. His eyes snapped open, pupils blown wide and glazed with a mixture of desperation and devotion. 

He looked like he was on the verge of shattering, his entire body vibrating with the effort of keeping his hands pinned above his head.

"You're so... fuck, you're so tight," he gasped, his voice trembling.

You smirked, leaning forward so your breasts brushed against his chest, your hair falling like a curtain around both your faces. "Am I, Spencer? Do I feel good?"

"Yes... please... god, yes," he whimpered, his hips giving a small, involuntary twitch upward.

You didn't let him move. Instead, you gripped his shoulders, pinning him further into the mattress, and began to move. You started slow, lifting yourself just enough to let the head of his cock slip out before slamming back down, burying him to the hilt with a wet, slapping sound.

The rhythm was deliberate and punishing. You weren't just fucking him, you were claiming him, even if you had no right to do so. 

Every time you descended, you felt him pulse inside you, his cock swelling even further as he fought the urge to thrust back. You could feel the tension in his thighs, the way his abdominal muscles were locked tight, his body a coiled spring of pure sexual frustration.

"Keep those hands still, good boy," you whispered, your voice a low, sultry command.

You increased the pace, your movements becoming more frantic and primal. You began to grind your clit against the base of his shaft, seeking your own pleasure while driving him further into the red. 

Spencer was no longer just moaning, he was making guttural, animalistic sounds. He was right on the edge, his breathing coming in ragged, desperate hitches. You could feel him twitching inside you, the tell-tale signs that he was seconds away from blowing.

You felt your own orgasm building, a tight coil of heat in your belly that threatened to snap. You leaned down, biting his earlobe hard enough to make him yelp, your voice a commanding hiss.

"I can feel you, Spencer. I can feel how badly you want to cum for me."

"I do... I'm... I'm right there... please!" he begged, his voice breaking.

You paused abruptly, freezing your hips mid-stroke, leaving him suspended in the most agonizing moment of anticipation. You looked down at him, seeing the sheer desperation in his eyes, the way he was practically vibrating beneath you.

"Not yet," you whispered, a cruel, beautiful smile on your lips. "I didn't tell you that you could."

You shifted your weight, lifting your hips. You reached up, grabbing his wrists and dragging his hands down from above his head, guiding them with a firm grip until his palms were pressed flat against the underside of your thighs.

Slowly, you fell forward, pressing your chest flush against his, your skin slick with sweat and heat, feeling of his racing heart hammering against your own ribs. 

Spencer froze for a second, his breath hitching. He knew the rules, but the placement of his hands was an invitation he couldn't ignore. He began to move, his hips bucking upward in slow, agonizingly deliberate thrusts. 

Because he was already balanced on the edge of climax, he was moving with cautious, trembling precision, terrified that one too-deep plunge would shatter his control and send him over the edge.

You had planned this perfectly. By giving him the physical means to drive himself into you, you had increased his torture. Now, the responsibility of his restraint lay entirely in his own muscles, and you could feel him shaking under the pressure. 

He was no longer just a passive recipient of your pleasure; he was fighting his own body, struggling to maintain the pace you demanded while his cock pulsed violently inside your tight, wet walls.

"That's it," you whispered into the crook of his neck, your voice thick with desire. "Slow... just like that. Don't ruin this by rushing."

Spencer let out a broken sound, a whimpering groan that vibrated through his chest and into yours. His fingers dug into the soft flesh of your thighs, anchoring you to him as he pushed up again, the wet, squelching sound of your pussy gripping his shaft filling the air. He was gasping for air, his eyes squeezed shut in a mask of pure, concentrated ecstasy and desperation.

He was fighting for every second, his hips twitching with the instinctive urge to slam into you with everything he had, but he held back, terrified of the punishment—or the loss of your approval. You could feel the pre-cum leaking from him, lubricating the friction as he continued to grind upward.

You arched your back, grinding your clit hard against the base of his cock, your own climax beginning to ripple through you. You loved the way he was struggling, the way he was completely at your mercy even while he was the one doing the thrusting.

"You're doing so well, Spencer," you breathed, your voice a teasing caress. "So close... I can feel you trembling. Do you want to let go? Do you want to fill me up?"

"Please..." he sobbed, his voice barely a whisper, his hips giving a sudden, sharp jerk that nearly sent him over. "Please, I can't... I can't hold it..."

“Make me cum and you can,” 

Spencer gasped, the words barely leaving his lips before his restraint snapped.

The slow, agonizing torture was over. He clearly didn't care about the rules anymore; he didn't care about the permission he had been begging for. He must’ve been able feel the tremors racking your body, the way your internal muscles were beginning to squeeze his cock in rhythmic, desperate pulses. He knew you were right there, balanced on the same edge as he was, and the realization triggered something primal in him.

With a guttural groan, Spencer stopped the cautious movements. He gripped your thighs with bruising force, his fingers digging deep into your skin, and began to buck upward with violent, unrestrained power.

The change in pace was electric. The slow grinds were replaced by hard, slapping thrusts that drove his cock deep into you, bottoming out with a wet, heavy thud every single time.

He was fucking you with a desperate, starving intensity, his entire body shaking with the effort. He wasn't just seeking his own release anymore; he was hunting for yours. He drove himself into you harder and faster, his cock rubbing aggressively against your G-spot and grinding into your clit with every upward surge.

"Come for me," he groaned, his voice raw and commanding, a sudden flip in the power dynamic as he focused entirely on your pleasure. "Fuck, you're so tight... just come already!"

You let out a loud, piercing scream, your head falling into the crook of his neck as the friction became unbearable in the best way possible. The sheer force of his thrusts was overloading your senses, pushing you past the point of no return. 

Your walls clamped down on him, tightening around his shaft with violent contractions that nearly sent him over the edge instantly, but he pushed through it, determined to see you shatter first.

He hammered into you one last time, a deep, punishing plunge that just near hit your cervix, sending a massive electrical shock through your entire nervous system.

Your orgasm ripped through you in waves of blinding intensity, your pussy gripping his cock in a series of tight, rhythmic spasms that sucked him deeper into your heat. You collapsed against his chest, sobbing and shaking, your body vibrating with the aftershocks of a massive climax.

The moment you peaked, Spencer lost every shred of control he had left. The feeling of your orgasm clamping around him was the final straw. He let out a choked, animalistic sound and gave one final, powerful thrust, burying himself as deep as he could possibly go.

He stiffened, his back arching off the bed as he finally exploded. You could feel the hot, thick ropes of his cum pulsing violently inside you, filling you up with wave after wave heat. 

He groaned loudly, his eyes rolling back in his head as he spent himself completely, his cock throbbing inside you while he shuddered in the grip of a long-overdue, crashing release.

Re remained inside of you as you stayed laying on top of him, his hands tracing indistinct shapes on your back softly.

Spencer gently squeezed your behind, the touch was a stark contrast to the bruising grip he’d had on you just moments ago. You leaned up, your skin still flushed and humming, just enough to lock eyes with him.

His gaze was soft, the pupils still blown wide from the rush of endorphins, filled with a complicated devotion. He reached up, his fingers grazing your cheek with a lightness that felt almost sacred, and slowly pushed a stray lock of hair behind your ear.

In that quiet look, the realization hit you again.  He had systematically ruined every other man for you. No one else knew the exact rhythm of your body, the precise way to push you to the edge, or how to surrender to you so completely. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

The silence was broken by a voice that sounded frayed, barely a whisper.

“I can’t do this again,” he said quietly.

The words landed like a physical blow. For as long as this had been going on, it had always been you playing the part of the one trying to walk away, with Spencer simply agreeing, both of you knowing you were lying. 

You had spent months in a cycle of desperate returns, crawling back to each other the moment the distance became unbearable. Hearing him be the one to draw the line hurt deeply, a sharp ache in your chest that mirrored the fading throb of your orgasm.

But as you looked at him, the pain shifted into a sudden, crystalline clarity.

Slowly, you pulled away from him. The sudden absence of his heat, the loss of him filling you, left you feeling cold and exposed. 

You leaned back in, pressing your lips to his in the smallest of kisses. In any other context, it would have felt like a final goodbye, a closing of a chapter. But here, it felt like reassurance. It was a promise whispered without words.

You stood up and walked out of his room, the door clicking softly behind you.

As you moved down the hallway, the smile remained on your face.

Despite the finality in his tone, you knew Spencer better than he knew himself. He wasn't pushing you away because he wanted you gone; he was pushing you away because the hunger had evolved into something he could no longer control. 

He was terrified of that truth, you knew it was only a matter of time before he realized it too.

a.n I couldn't not write again for these two. There's something so sexy about everything left unspoken 🫦

TAGLIST: @sweet-t33a @unlikelylovebarbarian @cocoabears @cryingoblivioneden @haydenssweetheart @sabbiabbydabbywabbie @moonz33@throughmylifetimesiwatchtheworld @pinkpantheris

You'd been sick before, but there was always someone there for you, and it had never been that bad before. The first thing you did was reach for your phone and call your boyfriend. You could barely make out his contact, but once you did the phone started to ring, making the pain in your head grow.

Spencer always picked up no matter how late it was. Whether he was in the middle of a case, or he was dead asleep, he'd still wake up and answer.

Except this was the first time he didn't. The call went to voicemail after ringing. You didn't know what to do. For so long Spencer had been the first person you called for anything. And now he wasn't picking up.

You tried again and again before giving up. You thought you were going to die in that bed. The constant ringing made your head hurt worse, you couldn't breath, partly from how stuffed your nose was, the other part from the shortness of breath you were experiencing.

You looked at your phone one last time, dialing one of your friends. They picked up quickly, sounding tired like they'd just woken up. They asked what was wrong and you told them. Their first thought was to ask if Spencer was there, which only made you cry in your delirious state. They then told you they'd be over any minute and to try and take some medicine if you could.

They let themselves into the apartment with their spare key. You don't remember too much. Just that they got you to choke down some sort of medicine and that one moment you were in a soft, yet empty bed, and the next you were somewhere where everything smelt sterile.

You awoke two days later, confused as to where you were. You sat up in an empty room, looking at your surroundings. Quickly you realized you were in the hospital, but you couldn't remember what for. All you remembered was the pain and Spencer not answering. After that it went blank.

Eventually a nurse came into your room. She seemed happy that you were finally awake, telling you what had happened. Your friend had rushed you to the hospital the second they noticed you were burning up badly and couldn't breath. The nurse told you it was good what your friend did. She said that if she didn't things might've taken a turn for the worse.

You didn't want to process what those words meant as you tried to get the thought to leave your head.

She told you how you had a severe fever, which had just started to go away. You felt better now, you could breathe easier, your head still slightly pounded, but not as bad, and your throat didn't feel as raw.

The nurse told you everything, except for the part where your boyfriend never answered the call the hospital gave, and he never returned it. Your friend showed up later to visit, bringing fresh clothes, food they knew you'd want, and comfort items from your apartment. They also didn't have the heart to tell you how Spencer never picked up the phone, or called back, even with the nasty voicemail they had left after he hadn't picked up for the tenth time. With how highly you spoke of Spencer, and how sweet he treated you when they met him they were shocked he hadn't answered once.

Your friend visited during the appropriate hours every day, making sure you weren't alone. You wanted to ask about Spencer, but couldn't bring yourself to. You hadn't checked your phone, too afraid to see that he either hadn't called once, or was now finally picking up his phone.

Another two days later you were discharged with instructions to return if the symptoms did. Luckily, you were fine and had recovered easily. You had finally looked at your phone to see that Spencer hadn't called once. You should've been surprised that with five missed calls from you he didn't think to answer once. But with how things had been going, and with how he left that night, even when you begged him not to, you couldn't bring yourself to feel a certain way about it.

The wound was too raw to acknowledge, and too old to dwell on.

You had been sitting on the couch, eating leftovers when your phone rang. Originally, you thought it was your friend checking up on you, but to your surprise it was Spencer. You stared at his name for a moment before answering.

"Hey," his voice rang out, one that you knew, but felt miles away from familiar anymore, "I just landed, I'll be home in a few minutes."

You had completely forgotten he was away on a case. When you got back to an empty apartment everything felt normal. Nothing felt out of place and you hadn't noticed that till now.

"That's great," you said, your face eerily empty.

"Why'd you call me so many times a few nights ago?" he asked casually.

It took everything in you not to throw up at that moment. He'd noticed the calls, but hadn't taken a moment to call back, or even text, or maybe even have Garcia, or any of your other friends he knew check on you.

"I would've called to ask earlier, but the case kept us super busy," he explained, which unfortunately did not help the gnawing feeling in your stomach.

"A pipe burst in the bathroom," you lied, not wanting him to worry about you, he'd been saving someone from getting murdered and was no doubt exhausted, there was no need to make him feel even worse, "I didn't know what to do, but I figured it out and everything is fine."

"That's good," he said, "I'm sorry I wasn't there to help."

"It's fine, everything's fine now."

"You sure?" he asked, questioning your tone. He knew how you'd repeat that everything was fine when it truly wasn't. He knew everything about you. At least he did, you weren't too sure these days.

"Yeah, I called a friend and they sorted it out," you told him, not exactly lying, since you did call your friend, it just wasn't the whole truth.

"Alright, I'll see you when I get home," he said, before adding, "I love you."

"Love you too," you said quickly before hanging up.

Spencer returned that night, content to see you. He kissed you like he usually did, helped you at night like he usually did, and then left a week later like he usually did.

Something felt different this time after he left. The first night was the worst, knowing he disappeared from you without a second thought. Every new first night alone you would crack open a bottle of wine, the amount of glasses increasing each time till it was a whole bottle.

The wine wasn't enough that night though and you decided to reopen the bottle of vodka in your fridge from your last girls night with Penelope and the rest of the BAU girls. You told yourself it would just be one vodka cranberry.

Which it was, but only for that night.

It took you three days to finish the bottle before moving to whatever drops of liquor you could find around your apartment. The headache you woke up with only got worse each morning, making you move onto morning mimosas. You told yourself it was just to help with the headache, no other reason.

The next day Spencer returned home. You did your best to hide what had happened the past four days. You filled the vodka bottle with water, since Spencer would most definitely notice it was empty. You did the same thing with the wine that sat on the counter just days ago. It was a good thing for you that Spencer never drank and would never have a reason to notice the alcohol free bottles.

Spencer stayed home for longer than usual. You were elated that you weren't waking up to an empty bed anymore. Your free time was no longer spent lying motionless on the couch, instead being filled with walks in the park, and dinners that ended with you cuddled up on the couch while some movie played.

The past three weeks had been the best in a long time. You were actually happy to return home from work instead of dreading the second your surroundings were forced to go silent.

You hadn't touched any of the remaining alcohol in the house. Even refusing the glass of wine Spencer offered you one night. Luckily he didn't pick up the bottle because only he would notice the change in the weight of it.

You'd gone three weeks without even thinking about needing a distraction until the only sound in your life was the crickets outside the window. Spencer had been called in for another case and had called you earlier in the afternoon to tell you he'd have to cancel on dinner that night.

It only hurt slightly less knowing he was gone, due to how well things were going. But even then it only took you till the second night alone to pick up the bottle again.

You'd made a trip to the liquor store after work, saying that you'd just pick up one bottle to enjoy with dinner. Somehow one bottle became three, and three bottles became not just wine. You woke up that morning feeling like you had less than a month ago.

The cycle had continued for a while. Growing more and more each time he left. Whether it was abrupt, or he called you from work, or you got to kiss him goodbye before he walked out the door, you resumed the same activity you did every time.

At some point cigarettes started to appear in your pocket. You had tried them once as a teenager, continuing the habit for a couple months till your friends wrestled away your stash. You thought back to how they'd all moved in rotation with you for a couple weeks making sure you actually quit smoking. They cared about you and refused to let you pick up a bad habit, instead trying to help you swap it out for a good one.

You wondered where all your old friends were. They probably had good lives. Lived in nice houses, worked a nice job, had a partner that was home. Maybe even kids they got to wake up to in the morning, instead of the same motionless air.

You tried to hide your habits and the cycle you'd been stuck in as best as possible from Spencer. Whenever he called or texted you that he was on his way home you quickly gathered yourself, throwing away all evidence of your drinking, hiding those that you didn't want him to see.

The cigarettes in your purse got stashed in between your collection of vinyl records. Spencer knew you were careful with them and he would never touch them without your permission, hence why it was the best hiding spot.

Everything had gone just your way. He never noticed and he never had any clue what you were doing while he was away. He didn't even know that you'd gotten fired from your job for being late and missing days. You kept that from him by leaving the house at your usual time. You sat in a small dingy bar that was always opened, drinking till you had to sober up just enough for him to not notice.

Even with you drinking while he was home he never noticed. And you believed he never would till one night.

The front door opened, you heard shoes being kicked off, a bag being put down gently on the ground as someone made their way through the apartment. You couldn't tell who it was, not even caring enough to move. You could barely feel whatever surface your face was on, much less move your head or open your eyes to see who was there.

Someone touched your arm gently as they whispered your name. You could just barely open your eyes to see someone's face in front of yours. You couldn't immediately recognize it, but your body felt too heavy to jump, instead you just stared at him.

"Hey," he said, his voice gentle, "I didn't mean to wake you."

Whoever this was must've thought you'd fallen asleep at wherever you were in your apartment.

"Who are you?" you slurred out, still able to lift your head, but able to move your mouth, "What are you doing in my apartment?"

He looked confused, "It's me, Spencer, Hotch let us all go home instead of doing paperwork this late."

You tried shaking your head, unsure if it moved or not, "No, no I live here alone. What are you doing here?"

He looked even more confused, retreating away from you. You couldn't tell where he was until a light switch flicked on. You squeezed your eyes shut, not expecting the intense light you were met with.

"What the-" you heard him say as he looked around the place.

There were bottles scattered around the place, mostly in the kitchen. On the counter where you were sitting, the space was littered with empty bottles of all kinds.

"What happened?" he questioned, unable to comprehend the sight before him.

The bright light seemed to make some part of your senses click into place as you lifted your head. You looked at what he was seeing, shrugging.

"I was bored," you slurred.

"You were bored so you drank an entire liquor store?" he questioned, his voice somewhere between surprised, concerned, and wanting to die from the fact he had no clue about this.

Once again you just shrugged, trying to keep your body upright.

"When did this start?" he asked, his voice almost a whisper.

"I don't know," you said, "Why do you care?"

"I'm your boyfriend, I should care, I should've known, I-" he tried to reason, but you cut him off.

"I don't have a boyfriend."

There was a beat of silence.

"What?" he said, his voice sounding caught in his throat. If you could make out his face better you would've said he was on the verge of tears.

"I live alone," you repeated.

He was silent again. He took a couple steps closer, lowering himself to your level.

"I knew-" he said, having to stop himself to clear his throat, "I knew you'd started smoking, but I couldn't bring myself to talk to you about it because I knew I was the reason why. But, I had no clue any of this was happening. I'm so sorry."

Tears were slowly falling down his face as he looked down. He couldn't look you in the eye. Not in that state. Not with knowing he was the reason why you'd been reduced to this.

"Stop being dramatic," you uttered, in your mind some stranger crying in front of you, "I once smoked a cigarette in a single drag." You drunkenly laughed at your own admission.

To you it was hilarious. Your horrible accomplishment was the funniest thing you could think of and was the first thing you thought of when he mentioned knowing your problem. To him it just made the pit growing in his stomach expand three times. He held his head down even further, the tears flowing even more.

"How did I let this happen?" he mumbled to himself.

"It's fine, I'm fine," you reassured him.

He shook his head, "No it's not, I should've noticed, I should've done something."

"Maybe," you said absentmindedly.

He finally looked back up at you, swallowing his tears for the time being. He had failed you at the moment, but he wasn't going to anymore.

"Let me get you to bed," he said standing up as he held out his hand to you.

"Why should I follow you?" you questioned, still unsure about the crying stranger in front of you.

He paused for a moment, opening his mouth, trying to think of what to say.

Eventually he settled on, "I don't know."

You sat there till lying down sounded nice and the stranger didn't seem like he was going to hurt you. He seemed rather caring, more than you thought anyone had been to you in awhile. You blindly followed him throughout your apartment, clinging onto him. Something about holding onto him made you feel safe and calm even in your drunken state.

He softly guided you onto your bed, onto the side you usually slept on. You got comfortable in your spot. He put the blanket over you as you grabbed onto it, pulling it closer to you.

"You're sweet," you drunkenly mumbled.

He didn't respond, instead just kneeled on the floor in front of you. He stayed there, resting his chin on the edge of the mattress, inches away from your serene face. The tears slightly fell off his face and onto the soft sheets as he watched you fall asleep. He continued to observe you as your breath evened out.

He placed a soft kiss on your forehead. He pulled back, admiring you for another long while.

"I'm so sorry," he uttered, even though he knew you couldn't hear him, "I'm to help you I swear, I'm going to take care of you from now on, I promise."

Those were the last words he said to you that night before climbing into the bed next to you. It felt off to him though. You were practically strangers to each other now. He had no clue you'd been fired, that you'd been drinking yourself away, or that you'd been dying in the hospital months ago. You had no clue how much of his absence had been eating away at him, and how much he was unable to sleep at night because of it.

He silently promised himself that he was going to do whatever it took to help you. Even if that meant him leaving. He then cried himself to sleep, quietly as to not wake you, just like he did every other night.

taglist ask to be added or removed

David Rossi loved hosting dinners.

Not because he particularly enjoyed cooking—though he’d spend the entire evening pretending he did, shooing away anyone who wandered too close to the stove with the indignation of a Michelin-star chef—but because dinner was one of the rare occasions when the people he cared about gathered for reasons that had nothing to do with bloodstained crime scenes or the worst humanity had to offer. Around his dining table, they weren’t profilers or agents or supervisors carrying the weight of impossible decisions. They were simply friends. They laughed a little louder, lingered a little longer over dessert, argued about books instead of behavioral patterns, and, for a few precious hours, remembered what life looked like outside the Bureau.

At least for the first twenty minutes.

After that, someone inevitably mentioned a case.

“You realize,” Morgan announced as he reached across the kitchen island and shamelessly stole a piece of warm bread straight from the basket, “this is exactly how horror movies start.”

Rossi didn’t even bother looking over his shoulder. He merely stirred the sauce with practiced ease, entirely unfazed by the theft.

“The difference,” he replied smoothly, “is that my guests survive dessert.”

Morgan laughed, surrendering with an exaggerated nod before tearing into the bread anyway.

The house was already alive with familiar voices.

Soft jazz drifted through hidden speakers, blending with the rhythmic clatter of pots and the comforting aroma of garlic, rosemary, simmering tomatoes, and freshly baked bread. Warm light spilled from antique lamps, reflecting against framed photographs and shelves lined with decades of books and souvenirs collected from places Rossi rarely spoke about. Every room carried that unmistakable feeling of having been lived in, a home that had witnessed countless celebrations, quiet conversations over late-night whiskey, and the occasional impromptu team meeting when cases refused to stay at Quantico.

Emily wandered into the kitchen, accepting a glass of wine from Rossi before immediately rolling her eyes at something Morgan said.

Garcia was already circling the living room in complete admiration, pausing every few steps to gush over a painting, a sculpture, or an antique clock.

“Oh my God, Rossi,” she gasped dramatically, “this lamp is gorgeous. It’s giving wealthy Italian novelist who solves crimes in his free time.”

“It was just a lamp until you said that.”

JJ slipped toward the patio with Henry balanced comfortably on her hip, the little boy already fascinated by the garden lights beginning to glow outside. Will followed behind carrying an impressive collection of toys that looked capable of entertaining an entire daycare, smiling patiently as Henry reached for everything except the toys he’d brought.

Hotch, unsurprisingly, had arrived exactly on time.

Not a minute early. Not a minute late.

His jacket was already neatly folded over the back of a chair, a glass of sparkling water in one hand as he quietly observed the controlled chaos with the smallest hint of amusement softening his usually unreadable expression.

And, of course, Spencer’s attention had been on you from the moment the two of you stepped through Rossi’s front door.

Before anyone could greet you, Spencer was already helping you out of your coat with the quiet attentiveness that had become second nature over the past several weeks. His hands were careful as he eased the fabric from your shoulders, lingering for just a heartbeat as if making sure you were steady before draping both your coat and his neatly over the rack by the entrance. It was such a small gesture that no one else would have noticed it.

“You okay?” he asked quietly, leaning close enough that only you could hear him beneath the lively chatter filling the room.

You offered him a reassuring smile, hoping it looked more convincing than it felt.

“Perfect.”

The word came automatically, polished by repetition until it sounded almost believable. You’d said it to your mother over the phone earlier that week. To your coworkers when they’d commented on how pale you’d been looking lately. To the cashier who had apologized after you’d abruptly abandoned a shopping cart halfway through the supermarket because someone nearby had opened a container of tuna. You were becoming remarkably good at pretending everything was normal.

Spencer, however, had never been particularly easy to fool.

His honey-colored eyes lingered on your face for another moment, quietly studying you with the same careful concentration he reserved for unsolved cases and impossible puzzles. He noticed everything: the faint shadows beneath your eyes despite the makeup you’d carefully applied that afternoon, the way your smile didn’t quite reach them, the almost invisible hesitation before you shifted your weight from one foot to the other. For a second, you watched concern flicker across his expression, followed by the unmistakable impulse to suggest going home instead. You knew him well enough to see the thought forming before he gently pushed it aside. You had insisted you wanted to come. You’d been looking forward to seeing everyone. If he asked again, you’d only reassure him again.

So instead, he simply intertwined his fingers with yours for the briefest moment and gave your hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it, silently reminding you that if you needed to leave, even five minutes after arriving, you only had to say the word.

Because the truth was…you hadn’t exactly been perfect lately.

For nearly eleven weeks, your body had seemed determined to reinvent itself overnight, transforming familiar routines into unpredictable obstacles and ordinary sensations into impossible challenges. Pregnancy wasn’t anything like the books had described. It wasn’t the glowing skin and sentimental smiles people loved talking about. At least, not yet. Right now, it was exhaustion so profound it settled into your bones no matter how much you slept. It was waking up starving only to burst into tears because the toast you’d been craving suddenly smelled unbearable. It was dizziness when you stood too quickly, headaches that appeared without warning, and emotions that shifted so rapidly they often left you laughing one moment and crying the next.

And the smells were by far the worst.

It was as though someone had turned every scent in the world up to an impossible volume.

Coffee, the rich aroma you’d once relied on every morning, now seemed so overwhelmingly bitter it made your stomach twist before you even entered the kitchen.

Garlic lingered in the air like smoke.

Perfume clung to strangers in grocery stores so intensely that you found yourself instinctively holding your breath as they walked past.

Gasoline from passing cars seeped through open windows with startling force.

Fresh paint, cleaning products, scented candles, everything had become an enemy.

Even the earthy fragrance of Spencer’s favorite loose-leaf tea, a scent that had always reminded you of rainy afternoons spent reading together on the couch, had betrayed you. One quiet Saturday morning, he’d barely begun pouring the boiling water over the tea leaves before your stomach lurched violently. You hadn’t even managed to explain what was wrong. You’d simply clamped a hand over your mouth and hurried toward the bathroom, leaving Spencer frozen in confusion beside the kettle.

When he’d found you a few minutes later, you were sitting on the cool tile floor with your knees pulled to your chest, wrapped in one of his oversized cardigans because you hadn’t had the energy to put on your own sweater after climbing out of bed. Your eyes were watery, your face pale with exhaustion, and the half-steeped tea sat forgotten in the kitchen.

He’d knelt beside you immediately, rubbing slow circles against your back until your breathing steadied.

“I think,” he’d said carefully, as though presenting a well-researched hypothesis, “we should buy different tea.”

The absurd sincerity of the suggestion had broken something inside you.

You’d laughed, the kind that left tears streaming down your face and your stomach aching until Spencer began smiling too, still entirely unsure what had been so funny.

An hour later, you’d taken the pregnancy test.

You remembered sitting together on the edge of the bathtub, your shoulders pressed together so tightly they might as well have been one person, both pretending not to stare at the little plastic stick resting on the counter. Spencer’s knee bounced nervously the entire time, though he’d deny it if anyone ever asked. When the result finally appeared, neither of you moved.

Positive.

You’d looked at him, and he’d looked at you.

For a long moment, there had simply been silence, stunned, breathless silence, as though neither of you trusted your own eyes enough to speak first.

Then Spencer had whispered, almost reverently,

“We’re having a baby.”

The memory still settled warmly inside your chest every time you thought about it.

Only the two of you knew.

No one else.

Not the team, your parents, or his mother.

No one.

It wasn’t because you weren’t excited.

God, you had never loved someone you’d never met quite so fiercely. And you had never been so afraid.

At night, when the apartment had gone quiet and Quantico seemed impossibly far away, the two of you often found yourselves lying awake long after the lights were off, talking in hushed voices about a future that suddenly felt both unimaginably distant and frighteningly close. Spencer wondered aloud whether babies recognized music before they were born and whether reading aloud during pregnancy had any measurable effect on language development. You debated names neither of you was ready to admit you genuinely liked. You imagined tiny knitted sweaters, impossibly small socks, sleepy mornings, first birthdays, scraped knees, school concerts, and the possibility—one that made you laugh every single time—that Spencer might accidentally teach your future toddler quantum mechanics before the alphabet.

Other nights, words simply weren’t necessary.

You would lie tangled together beneath the blankets, your head resting against his shoulder while he absentmindedly traced slow circles over your arm. Eventually, almost without thinking, his hand would drift lower, settling with extraordinary care against your abdomen. There was hardly anything to feel yet. At eleven weeks, your stomach remained almost perfectly flat, your dresses fitting exactly as they always had. If someone didn’t know, they would never have guessed. But Spencer touched you as though the slightest movement might disturb the tiny life growing there, his palm resting so gently against you that it sometimes made your chest ache. He would smile into the darkness with an expression so impossibly soft it stole your breath every single time, as though he could already sense the little heartbeat hidden beneath his fingertips. Sometimes he whispered things you weren’t sure he realized he was saying: little observations about fetal development he’d memorized from medical journals, promises about museums he’d one day visit with your child, absentminded thoughts about buying children’s editions of classic literature. Other times, he simply stayed there, smiling quietly, overwhelmed by the astonishing reality that someone already existed. Someone who belonged entirely to the two of you.

Every ultrasound photograph had become a treasure.

The first one lived inside an ivory envelope that had already begun to soften at the edges because neither of you could stop taking it out to look at it. Realistically, there wasn’t very much to see. To anyone else, it was little more than a grainy black-and-white blur surrounded by indecipherable shadows and medical measurements. Yet the two of you had spent embarrassing amounts of time staring at it as though it were the most extraordinary piece of art ever created. Spencer, naturally, had analyzed it with the same enthusiasm he brought to everything else.

Of course, once the initial excitement had settled, he had immediately begun worrying about where to keep the photographs.

Not because he thought someone was going to steal them.

Because he wanted them safe.

You still remembered finding him standing in front of his bookshelf one afternoon, head tilted thoughtfully as though he were solving one of the Bureau’s most complicated cases. He had scanned hundreds of titles before finally pulling out one of the thickest mathematics textbooks you had ever seen.

“They’re going inside my copy of Differential Geometry,” he’d declared with complete confidence while carefully sliding the envelope between two chapters.

You had stared at him, blinking in complete confusion.

“…Why that one?”

Without so much as lifting his eyes from the pages, he’d answered with absolute certainty.

“Statistically speaking, no one voluntarily opens my copy of Differential Geometry.”

You had laughed so hard your stomach hurt.

Weeks later, the ultrasound photographs remained exactly where he’d hidden them, tucked safely between chapters discussing curved manifolds and tensor fields, untouched by anyone except the two of you. Every now and then, usually late at night, Spencer would quietly retrieve the envelope before climbing into bed beside you, and together you’d study the tiny image all over again, smiling as though seeing it for the very first time.

You weren’t keeping the pregnancy a secret because you were ashamed.

If anything, the secret had become almost impossible to contain.

You loved this baby already with a depth that surprised you daily. Sometimes you caught yourself resting your hand absentmindedly against your stomach while reading on the couch or waiting in line for coffee you could no longer stomach. Sometimes Spencer would catch your eye from across the apartment, and without either of you saying a single word, you’d both smile, remembering the extraordinary little secret that existed only between you. It felt like carrying a universe inside your chest, one that threatened to spill into every conversation, every laugh, every quiet glance exchanged across a room.

But eleven weeks still felt fragile.

Delicate.

As though happiness itself had become something you were afraid to hold too tightly.

You knew the statistics.

So did Spencer...perhaps better than anyone.

The first trimester carried uncertainties neither of you could ignore, no matter how desperately you wanted to celebrate. So you had made a quiet promise together. Just a little longer. One more week. Maybe two. Long enough for the fear to loosen its grip. Long enough for the joy to feel louder than the anxiety. Then you’d tell everyone. Properly. Surrounded by the people who loved you most.

Which was exactly why tonight needed to remain wonderfully, blissfully ordinary.

Smile.

Compliment Rossi’s cooking.

Laugh at Morgan’s increasingly terrible jokes.

Listen to Garcia declare herself emotionally attached to another one of Rossi’s antique decorations.

Eat dinner.

Go home.

And above all else, pretend that beneath the soft fabric of your dress, your entire world wasn’t quietly growing one tiny heartbeat at a time.

***

For the first few minutes, everything went exactly according to plan.

The conversation flowed effortlessly around the table, moving from travel stories to teasing remarks about Rossi’s inability to let anyone else near his kitchen. The warm glow of candlelight reflected against crystal glasses, silverware clinked softly against porcelain plates, and the rich aroma of roasted vegetables, fresh herbs, garlic, and homemade pasta drifted through the dining room. It was warm. Comfortable. Familiar. Exactly the kind of evening you’d hoped for.

Then Rossi appeared beside the table carrying a bottle of red wine.

With practiced ease, he moved from place to place, pouring generous servings into each waiting glass until he eventually reached yours. Deep ruby liquid swirled elegantly into the crystal, catching the candlelight before he continued around the table without another thought.

Your smile froze.

Your stomach dropped so suddenly it almost felt like missing the last step on a staircase.

Of course. Wine.

You hadn’t thought about the wine.

For one long second, you simply stared at the glass sitting innocently beside your plate, your thoughts racing far faster than they should have. Refusing it outright would be strange. Claiming you weren’t in the mood might invite questions. Pretending to sip it was risky, especially with Rossi proudly watching everyone’s reactions to the bottle he’d undoubtedly spent far too much money on.

Across the table, Spencer had arrived at the exact same realization.

His eyes drifted from his own glass to yours.

Then to you.

You watched the understanding settle across his face almost instantly.

Without either of you exchanging so much as a glance, he quietly reached across the table toward your place setting, his movements so natural they might have gone completely unnoticed.

“I’ll take yours,” he said casually, lifting the untouched glass before anyone could question it.

Morgan blinked. “You stealing her wine already?”

The question earned a few amused smiles around the table.

Spencer answered so quickly it almost sounded rehearsed.

“She’s driving.”

For a single heartbeat, the entire table fell into that peculiar silence that followed an answer no one had expected. You turned your head slowly to look at him, your expression carefully composed despite the disbelief bubbling beneath it.

Driving? You hated driving.

Everyone at the table knew you hated driving. Morgan had teased you about it for years after you’d once admitted that parallel parking made you feel like you were diffusing a bomb. Garcia had jokingly offered to create a color-coded GPS system “for emotionally distressed drivers.” Even Rossi had learned long ago that inviting the two of you over automatically meant Spencer would be behind the wheel on the way home. If given the choice between navigating rush-hour traffic yourself or spending an hour on public transportation with three transfers, you’d choose the train without a second thought. Spencer knew that better than anyone. Which was precisely why, judging by the fleeting look of horror that crossed his face, he realized what he’d said the exact moment the words left his mouth.

Your eyes met across the table for the briefest instant.

He knew. You knew.

Neither of you dared acknowledge it.

Fortunately, Morgan simply shrugged, entirely unbothered.

“Fair enough.”

The conversation drifted elsewhere almost immediately, someone making a comment about Rossi’s pasta sauce before Garcia launched into a dramatic story about accidentally adopting another stray cat she absolutely insisted she hadn’t meant to bring home. Around the table, laughter resumed, forks scraped softly against porcelain plates, and the comfortable rhythm of dinner settled back into place. You released a slow breath you hadn’t realized you’d been holding, allowing yourself to believe, if only for a moment, that perhaps the obstacle had been overcome more easily than you’d feared.

Or so you thought.

Barely ten minutes later, Rossi reappeared beside your chair carrying the bottle of red wine in one hand, his attention immediately falling to the untouched glass still sitting exactly where he’d left it. His thick brows drew together in mild confusion before his expression softened into concern.

“Oh, bambina,” he said, tilting his head slightly as he gestured toward the glass. “You haven’t touched your wine.”

Your heart lurched.

For a fraction of a second, your mind raced desperately through possible explanations. You weren’t feeling like drinking. You were waiting until dinner. You had a headache. None of them felt convincing enough, particularly not with Rossi watching you so expectantly.

Before you could utter a single word, Spencer calmly reached across the table, lifted your untouched glass as though it had belonged to him all along, and took a generous sip.

“I did.”

Rossi looked between both of you.

“You finished two glasses already?”

“I was thirsty,” Spencer replied with complete sincerity, sounding as though that single sentence explained everything.

Rossi stared at him.

“You were thirsty.”

“Yes.”

“For wine.”

“Correct.”

For another beat, Rossi simply looked at him, clearly debating whether there was any point continuing the conversation. Eventually, with the resigned expression of a man deciding that Spencer Reid’s brain operated on principles beyond ordinary comprehension, he shrugged lightly and reached for the bottle once more.

“There.”

Deep red wine flowed smoothly back into your crystal glass until it sat nearly full again.

“There we go.”

“Thank you,” you offered with what you hoped was a perfectly natural smile.

Rossi nodded once before wandering toward the other end of the table to refill Morgan’s glass, already distracted by an entirely new discussion about baseball statistics.

The instant his back was turned, Spencer moved.

Without saying a word, without drawing attention to himself, he rested one hand casually beneath the edge of the tablecloth and, in one fluid movement, exchanged your freshly filled glass with his own half-empty one. The motion was so smooth it could have passed for absentmindedness, his fingers never fumbling despite the growing amount of alcohol already in his system. By the time Rossi looked back toward the two of you, Spencer was quietly lifting the newly acquired glass toward his lips while your place setting once again held one that appeared partially consumed.

No one noticed.

Well…almost no one.

Across the table, Emily’s conversation with JJ faltered for just a fraction of a second.

She didn’t say anything.

She simply took another sip of wine while her gaze lingered thoughtfully between the two of you before returning to her plate.

Another half hour slipped by beneath easy conversation and frequent bursts of laughter. Stories gave way to teasing, teasing turned into old Bureau memories, and before long the first bottle stood empty in the center of the table. Rossi noticed almost immediately.

“Well,” he announced proudly as he disappeared toward the kitchen, “that means it’s time for the good one.”

He returned carrying another bottle with the reverence of someone transporting a priceless family heirloom.

“This one’s from Tuscany,” he declared, carefully peeling away the foil. “I bought it during my last trip. You have to try it.”

The cork eased free with a satisfying pop.

You felt your stomach sink all over again.

One by one, Rossi circled the table, refilling each glass with generous enthusiasm.

Including yours.

Again.

You forced another smile.

“Thank you.”

Your glass remained untouched.

Again.

Spencer noticed before anyone else did.

Again.

Without hesitation, he reached over sometime during the next conversation, lifted your glass as naturally as though the two of you shared everything—which, technically, you did—and quietly added yet another serving to the growing collection he’d already consumed.

By now he’d finished one glass.

Then two.

Then three.

Now…four.

Under ordinary circumstances, four glasses of wine spread across an entire dinner might not have seemed particularly remarkable.

For Spencer Reid, it was becoming increasingly obvious.

A warm flush had spread across his cheeks, dusting the bridge of his nose with soft pink that somehow made him look several years younger. His posture remained perfectly straight, and his words retained the precise articulation that years of lecturing and endless reading had ingrained into him. If anything, he enunciated even more carefully than usual, each syllable pronounced with meticulous clarity. Spencer Reid, it seemed, was physically incapable of slurring his words.

Instead, he simply became significantly more talkative.

“Do you know,” he announced to absolutely no one in particular while thoughtfully examining his wineglass as though it were a fascinating scientific specimen, “that the average adult liver metabolizes approximately one standard alcoholic beverage per hour? Assuming average enzymatic activity and normal hepatic function, I’m currently operating at a significant biochemical disadvantage.”

Morgan leaned back in his chair, grinning so broadly it bordered on smug satisfaction.

“You drunk, pretty boy?”

Spencer looked genuinely offended by the suggestion.

“No.”

He paused.

Thought about it.

Then nodded once with complete seriousness.

“Probably.”

The table erupted into laughter.

Even Hotch lowered his gaze toward his plate to disguise the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

You couldn’t help laughing too, though yours carried a distinct note of affection.

Spencer looked utterly adorable.

Hopelessly, undeniably adorable.

Across the table, however, Emily wasn’t laughing nearly as much.

She watched Spencer lift your glass instead of his own.

Again.

She watched you politely thank Rossi for every refill without drinking a single sip.

Again.

She watched Spencer volunteer to finish both glasses with increasingly enthusiastic determination.

Again.

Something about the evening refused to fit together.

Emily wasn’t quite sure what the answer was yet.

But she knew, with absolute certainty, that something wasn’t adding up.

***

By the time coffee replaced the wine, the evening had settled into that wonderfully unhurried stage that always followed one of Rossi’s dinners. Dessert plates had been pushed aside, empty bottles stood abandoned along the center of the table like evidence of a celebration well enjoyed, and the rich scent of freshly brewed espresso drifted through the dining room, mercifully replacing the overwhelming aroma of alcohol. Conversations had fractured into smaller ones, overlapping comfortably without anyone needing to follow every thread. Garcia and JJ were animatedly debating vacation destinations, Garcia insisting that every itinerary should be based entirely around bookstores and bakeries while JJ attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince her that beaches had their own merits. At the other end of the table, Morgan and Rossi had somehow wandered into a passionate disagreement over baseball statistics, each one accusing the other of remembering history incorrectly despite both sounding equally confident. Hotch sat quietly between them, one hand wrapped around his coffee cup, saying very little but wearing the faintest trace of amusement at the corners of his mouth as he watched the familiar chaos unfold around him.

Beside you, however, sat the true consequence of the evening.

Spencer Reid was undeniably drunk.

Not the loud, reckless kind of drunk that knocked over glasses or forgot people’s names. Spencer remained perfectly articulate. Every sentence emerged with the same impeccable diction he used while lecturing, every word carefully pronounced as though he were still delivering an academic presentation. If anything, the alcohol had only made him even more determined to enunciate correctly. His tie had been loosened somewhere between the second and third bottle, though neither of you remembered who had done it. His curls had escaped in every direction until they framed his flushed face in complete disarray. A warm blush stretched across his cheeks and over the bridge of his nose, his eyes had taken on a dreamy softness you rarely saw, and he had developed the oddly adorable habit of pausing before every answer, nodding solemnly to himself as though consulting an invisible committee inside his own mind before reaching a unanimous decision.

Watching him was almost painfully endearing.

You couldn’t help smiling as your fingers found the middle of his back, rubbing slow, comforting circles through the fabric of his shirt.

“You okay?”

He turned toward you immediately, his entire face lighting up with such overwhelming affection that your heart threatened to melt on the spot.

“I love you.”

The words came so easily, so honestly, that several people around the table instinctively smiled.

You laughed quietly.

“I love you too.”

“No…” He shook his head with exaggerated seriousness, lifting one finger as though correcting an important scientific misconception. “I don’t think you understand the statistical magnitude of how much I love you.”

Morgan snorted into his coffee.

“Oh, this is priceless.”

Spencer didn’t even acknowledge him.

His complete attention remained fixed on you, his expression one of absolute sincerity as he searched painstakingly for the perfect description.

“You are…” He frowned thoughtfully, eyes drifting toward the ceiling for several long seconds before returning to you with visible satisfaction. “…my favorite person.”

Warmth spread through your chest so quickly it almost hurt.

God, he was going to destroy you.

“You’ve had enough wine,” you said gently, brushing one of his unruly curls away from his forehead.

“I have had…” He stopped speaking to count carefully on his fingers, restarting twice after apparently losing track somewhere around three. “…more wine than you.”

“Yes.”

He nodded proudly, pleased that you’d confirmed his calculation.

“Because you couldn’t.”

Every muscle in your body went rigid.

The smile disappeared from your face almost instantly.

“Spencer.”

He looked delighted with himself.

“I helped.”

Across the table, Emily glanced up from her coffee.

“So noble.”

“It was.” Spencer nodded once, completely accepting the compliment. “Because it’s a secret.”

Your stomach dropped so violently you were certain everyone could hear it.

Without thinking, you reached for his hand beneath the table, gently squeezing his fingers.

“Sweetheart—”

He leaned closer immediately, lowering his voice in what he clearly believed was an incredibly discreet whisper.

It wasn’t.

“We’re very good at secrets,” he confided with unmistakable pride.

The entire table continued talking.

No one seemed to notice.

Relief washed over you so suddenly you nearly laughed.

Then Spencer smiled thoughtfully, as though another important realization had just occurred to him.

“Although…”

Every instinct in your body screamed.

“Oh no.”

He looked around the entire table before announcing, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the dining room to hear with perfect clarity, “keeping a baby secret is significantly harder than I expected.”

Silence.

Morgan blinked once.

“A what?”

Garcia’s mouth slowly fell open.

JJ lowered her coffee cup so carefully it barely made a sound against the saucer.

At the far end of the table, Hotch’s eyes shifted from Spencer to you with the calm expression of a profiler mentally reorganizing every unusual observation he’d made over the previous several weeks: your sudden avoidance of coffee during morning meetings, Spencer’s increasingly protective behavior, the mysterious disappearances during cases to “find crackers,” the exhaustion, the nausea, the untouched wine.

Pieces quietly clicked into place.

Rossi simply stared.

His mouth opened slightly before closing again.

For perhaps the first time in anyone’s memory, David Rossi seemed completely incapable of finding words.

Emily, meanwhile, merely closed her eyes and a slow smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“Oh,” she sighed, sounding more relieved than surprised. “I knew it.”

You buried your face in both hands.

“Spencer…”

He looked around the table with complete confusion, blinking at everyone’s expressions as though he genuinely couldn’t understand why the conversation had stopped.

“What?”

“You…” you whispered through your hands, shaking your head helplessly. “You just told them about our baby.”

His eyebrows lifted.

“I did?”

“Yes.”

A long pause.

He frowned thoughtfully.

“I wasn’t supposed to.”

“No.”

“Oh.”

He considered that information with remarkable seriousness, nodding slowly as though accepting constructive criticism.

For one suspended heartbeat, nobody moved.

Then Garcia exploded.

The delighted shriek that escaped her was so loud it probably startled every bird within a three-block radius. She launched herself out of her chair before anyone else had even processed what was happening, one hand already covering her mouth as tears filled her eyes.

“I can't believe it!” she squealed. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

JJ was crying before she’d even reached you.

She wrapped her arms tightly around your shoulders, laughing and wiping away tears simultaneously.

“I am so happy for you,” she whispered.

Morgan shot to his feet with a bark of laughter, pointing triumphantly between the two of you.

“I knew something was going on!”

Emily looked at him flatly.

“You absolutely did not.”

“I suspected!”

She folded her arms.

“You spent the entire evening convinced Spencer had developed a drinking problem.”

Morgan hesitated.

“I was…close.”

Rossi finally recovered enough to laugh, a deep, warm laugh that echoed through the dining room as he crossed the room and pulled both you and Spencer into one of his characteristically overwhelming hugs.

“I’ve spent years trying to get this kid drunk,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief as he stepped back to look at Spencer with unmistakable affection. “Years.”

His eyes flickered toward you before returning to Spencer.

“I have to admit…”

He smiled.

“I didn’t expect this to be what finally loosened his tongue.”

Even Hotch stood.

He wasn’t particularly demonstrative, never had been, but the smile he offered the two of you was genuine enough to soften every sharp line in his face.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” you whispered, your voice thick with emotion as you leaned instinctively against Spencer’s shoulder, still half laughing and half hiding your burning face from everyone’s delighted attention.

Spencer looked down at you with sleepy affection, completely oblivious to the fact that he had single-handedly dismantled weeks of carefully orchestrated secrecy. He leaned over and pressed the gentlest kiss against the top of your head before sighing softly.

“I ruined the surprise.”

“You did.”

“I’m sorry.”

You looked up at him.

His expression was so genuinely remorseful, so heartbreakingly sincere despite the unmistakable haze of alcohol clouding his thoughts, that you couldn’t possibly stay embarrassed.

A smile spread across your face.

“I’ll forgive you.”

His eyes brightened immediately.

“You will?”

“Eventually.”

The relieved smile that followed was almost childlike.

“Good.”

He sat quietly for another few seconds, apparently satisfied that the crisis had been resolved.

Then he turned toward Rossi with complete seriousness.