kesha

 You sit in the middle of it all, shoulders loose, a half-finished drink warming between your palms. A fire kindles in your chest, and expands until it presses against your ribs. 

It arrives with no fanfare, and suddenly the world is too beautiful to carry alone, the plague of gratitude and joy, impossible to quarantine. It spills from rib to rib until every breath catches on light. Even the room seems to laugh with you. 

The sky forgets its distance and joy multiplies fast; if this is an illness, you shall let it have you completely. Let it flood every quiet room, every trembling hand, every lonely name. Someone speaks, and joy jumps ship, landing in their chest too. You are sick with wanting more days exactly like this–breathing out thank you, thank you, thank you, until the whole room is infected.

Morgan's laugh is the loudest, rolling out of him like he has never once learned to ration joy. Garcia's bracelets jangle every time she reaches for the shared plate of fries, which is often. JJ’s smile is soft, aimed at Emily, her eyes crinkling at the edges. Rossi is halfway through a story about a man in Palermo who owed him money and a favor and gave him neither, and he is telling it with his hands, both of them, wine forgotten, and the punchline is still two minutes out.

Hotch left at nine thirty. He stood up, put his hand on the back of his chair, said “don’t drive,” said “good work,” to the room in the voice other men use for I love you, and went home to a five-year-old who has been asleep for hours and who he will look at anyway. It is the six of you now, in the back corner, under a neon sign for a beer they stopped making in 2004.

None of you have to pretend that you are made of anything harder than flesh. 

Spencer is sat beside you, close enough that every time he shifts, the sleeve of his cardigan brushes your arm. He has one beer that he has been nursing for over an hour, gone warm and flat in his hand, more prop than beverage. Across the table, Garcia has begun telling a story that involved a disastrous online order and a package of sequined panties that somehow ended up in an evidence locker. Morgan is already halfway out of his chair with amusement. 

You laugh so hard you have to put your forehead down on the table, on the sticky varnish, on somebody’s ring of condensation; Spencer’s hand comes to rest very lightly between your shoulder blades for approximately four seconds and then goes away again.

In a world of dog-eat-dog, this is the easiest hour of your life.

No teeth are bared, no scrambling, just the soft animal truth that you are fed, you are warm, you are here and so is everyone you love, at least for now, at least in this room. The wolves rest today, and ambition puts its feet up. The whole pack curled up together in the one hour nobody has to fight for.

JJ gestures for another round. Someone–Rossi, you think–has ordered a plate of something fried and questionable that arrives glistening under the low lights. The conversation swirls and eddies around you, easy as flowing water. You contribute when the current pulls you in, and when it doesn’t, you simply float, and that is allowed too. 

It is Morgan who turns the ship; he leans forward, elbows on the table, a familiar grin spreading across his face. He has just decided that the night needs a new kind of fuel. “Okay. New business.  I want everyone's worst hookup story, and I mean worst; I want blood in the water.”

“Absolutely not,” says JJ, already laughing with her hands over her face.

“Absolutely yes, and you’re going first, because you looked away.”

“I have a child.”

“You had to have that child somehow, JJ.”

“I hate you,” she says into her hands.

“You love me. Now go.”

She goes eventually, because the table starts a slow drumroll on the tabletop and there is no dignity available to her in any direction. Her story is approximately four sentences long, delivered mostly into her glass, and involves a Christmas tree lot, the back of a car, and a man who was not an employee there.

“Then why was he wearing–”

“I have no clue, Emily.”

“You don’t know?”

“I was twenty!”

The table erupts, and Morgan points at JJ with the whole flat of his hand like he’s presenting evidence to a jury, saying,

“This, this is what I’m talking about; this is what I wanted.”

Emily follows suit without being asked. Hers begins at a diplomatic function in Prague and ends with her explaining, in Czech, to a man in a tuxedo why she was standing inside of a coat closet.

“So what did he say?” Garcia urges.

“He said it was fine.” “It was fine?”

“He said it happens.” Emily takes a drink. “That’s the part that’s stayed with me. Not that I got caught. That a man in a tuxedo looked into that closet and decided it was ordinary.”

“What happened after?” “There was no after; there was just a point where I left the country.”

Garcia’s is next, and she requires no encouragement whatsoever. Her tale involves a fantasy convention, a hotel with a broken thermostat, and a costume that was not technically flame-retardant.

You have your face in your hands; your ribs hurt, you are already a little loose from the tequila, and the world's edges are just a touch softer, making every laugh land deeper in your chest. Happiness sits in you like a second heartbeat, steady and almost too big. You think, distantly, that if someone cracked your ribs open right now they would find nothing in there but light.

Rossi’s, when his turn comes, is two sentences and a shrug, the moral center of a shipwreck. All that follows is silence, and then:

“That’s it?” Garcia says. “That’s all we get?”

“That’s all anybody gets,” Rossi says serenely, and sips his four-dollar red.

The drinks keep coming, for Morgan has decided that the only acceptable way to mark the occasion is another round, and then another. Your glass empties and refills without you quite tracking how. Your drink has turned into something sweeter, stronger; the room has taken on that gentle, golden tilt and every sound is richer, rounder at the edges, like it’s been dipped in something warm before it reaches you. Garcia's bracelets jangle like tiny little bells.

Morgan turns his head, full of theater, and looks at Spencer. The whole table leans in like a held breath about to be spent–the hush of a crowd right before a card trick. There is no better sport on earth than watching Spencer Reid be asked a personal question.

He goes red from the collar up, a tide coming in. “I don’t–okay. Okay, statistically, self-reported sexual histories are the least reliable data in all of behavioral science. People overreport, and there is asymmetry in the direction of the lie, which tells you significantly more about social expectation than it does about actual–”

“Reid.”

“--behavior, so in a very real sense this entire exercise is a study in performance rather than in–”

“Reid.”

He stops and looks into his warm beer as though the answer might be somewhere in the abyss of it.

“There was a girl in the physics program at Caltech, and we knocked over a bookcase.”

One full second of nothing.

“A bookcase,” Morgan jeers.

“It was load-bearing for the entire organizational system of the room,” Spencer says, wretched, “and I spent the rest of the night alphabetizing.”

“Did you finish?” Emily asks.

“The–the alphabetizing?”

“Reid.” “Yes,” Spencer says, “I finished.”

You are laughing so hard that you have one hand curled around his forearm because you need something to hold onto, and he lets you, and the neon over the booth turns everything the color of a warm bruise. You are unshakeably happy, surrounded, and for once not carrying anything heavier than the pleasant float of too many drinks.

It is your turn before you fully realize the circle has closed around you.

Morgan points at you with the neck of his bottle, eyes bright. “Your turn, pretty girl. Don’t hold out on us.”

The alcohol has sanded the edges off of everything, and you laugh; the sound is easy and a little breathless, and you set your glass down carefully because your fingers feel pleasantly unreliable.

“I’ve got nothing.” “Come on.”

“No–I mean I’ve got nothing.” You lift your glass an inch, a toast to the void. “I’m a virgin.”

It is not a hard thing to say, here, tonight, in this booth; it is a slightly warm thing, tepid coal after being burned down past the danger of it, a hot thing that would’ve once scorched you, has now gone soft and orange and harmless, passed hand to hand around a fire because everyone here would rather hold it than let it die out.

Morgan's eyebrows go up. “Shut up.” He says, delighted, the way he’d say it if you told him you’d met the President.

The teasing that follows is immediate, merciless, and completely without teeth. Derek starts by inventing increasingly elaborate scenarios involving you in various precarious positions. You take it all in and lean into it.

The alcohol has made everything soft and bright, and the teasing feels like affection wearing a louder coat. Spencer’s shoulder is pressed fully against yours now, and when you glance sideways at him, his eyes are warm in a way that makes your already spinning head spin a fraction more.

He does not join the teasing; he simply stays close, the stable, quiet center of the storm, and every so often his fingers brush the back of your hand under the table. He feels like the only solid thing left in your world that has now developed a suede finish. The one thing your hand keeps finding without you sending it looking.

Somebody orders another round. Someone else–probably Morgan–declares that the night is still young and that virginity is a state of mind that can be fixed with the right amount of tequila, and JJ throws a napkin at him.

You tip your head back against the booth and laugh until your heart hurts, and the joy in your chest is so large and so simple it almost feels like it could lift you clean out of the booth and into the pink and blue night outside.

The fire in your chest has room; there is nowhere else on earth you would rather be. Nobody warns you how much can go right in one unremarkable night, how full a person can get on nothing but light and noise and the people who stayed.

Penelope has commandeered the jukebox with a fistful of quarters, and every four minutes the whole tenor of the room changes, as she deposits another selection into what she keeps calling “the queue of joy.” Something with horns in it gives way to something slow and sweet, with a beat you can feel in the tabletop, and every time the song turns over Garcia does a small shimmy back to the booth

She hauls you up for a song with a saxophone in it, both your hands in both of hers, and you go, because you are drunk and warm and every breed of happy.

You dance badly, and so does the rest of the team. Morgan does something with his shoulders, and JJ laughs so hard she has to sit back down, shoeless feet tucked under her in the booth, and you laugh too, breathless, spinning once under Garcia’s raised arm just to feel the room tilt on its own axis for a second.

When the song ends, you drop back into the booth out of breath, chest heaving, grin stretching across your whole face, and Spencer is right there where you left him; you have found your true north. He watches you quietly, and when you sit, he shifts an inch closer.

The action makes you giggle into your hands, and the whole table is loud around you, the neon doing its slow, warm-colored thing over everyone’s faces, and somewhere in the last hour the fire in your chest has become something else: a house that’s finally warm all the way through.

You lose twenty minutes somewhere in there and find them again with your head on Spencer’s shoulder.

Your limbs feel loose and generous, with your temple against the bone of his shoulder and your hand gathered up in the loose knit at his elbow, and you let the table go on without you for a while, and the whole warm noise of it comes to you slightly muffled. You turn your face in a little further.

“Spencer.” His name comes out a bit slower than you intended. “Mm.”

“Take me home.” 

There is a pause above you, and you feel him look down.

“Please,” you add into his cardigan.

“Okay,” Spencer says immediately, without any air between the word and the question, like it had already been sitting in his mouth.

Morgan overhears and immediately begins a theatrical protest about abandoning the party, but you are already sliding out of the booth, laughing, one hand still caught in the fabric of Spencer’s sleeve. The others call after you with varying degrees of mock betrayal. Garcia blows extravagant kisses before getting up, sauntering over to you, and hugging you so hard your spine clicks.

“You,” she says into your hair, “are so so precious. I mean it.”

“Thank you, Pen, I know.”

“You don’t,” she says before giving you a kiss on the cheek and holding your face in both hands for a second, her rings cold against your jaw, before she is gone across the bar.

The good hours have let your hand go, though they were generous all the way right up to the door. A chest full of embers sits still and warm in your chest, and you let the hour close, let the light change; nothing has ended here, it has only traveled out through your ribs into whatever comes next, already looking for the next room to light up. 

Spencer has your coat off the hook before you have finished saying goodbye to anyone, holding it open at exactly the right height without being asked, and you shrug into it backward twice before getting it right. He waits for you patiently as weather, one hand hovering an inch from your shoulder in case the floor decides to be unkind to you on your way past it.

Outside the cold air nips at you; it is chilly and wet and tastes of asphalt, and you pull it in anyway. It rained while you were away. The street has that black mirrored look, every light doubled, the world laid out twice–once solid, once trembling.

Spencer steadies you with a hand at the small of your back when you misjudge the curb, and you let yourself tip toward him half a degree more than balance requires. The touch is light, familiar, the kind of contact that has always existed between the two of you. You lean in to it, claiming more of him than the night allows. 

The rain has stopped, but the city hasn’t dried, every surface still slick and confessional. You walk without speaking, and the silence asks nothing of either of you.

It settles over your shoulders as naturally as the damp night, soft and unhurried, stitched together by footsteps that have learned each other's rhythm years ago. The easy intimacy of matching breaths that bloom white into the cold, in slowing your pace without realizing you’ve matched someone else's stride 

Streetlights bleed downward into the puddles, doubling everything–you, him, the whole quiet block–as if the city wants a second copy of this moment, one to keep for itself after you’ve both walked on. The sounds of traffic are softer, muffled, like the world put on socks to walk around in. 

Spencer’s hand doesn’t move from the small of your back–just stays there, warm against the chill coming up off the concrete, and so you tip your head against his shoulder while he raises an arm for a taxi.

“Spencer. Can I tell you something?”

“That depends entirely on the something you’re referring to.”

“I’m serious.” You point at him, finger not entirely steady.

He goes quiet to show that he is actually listening, and it makes you sway a bit. You look at him for a second too long before you say it; now that you have his full attention, you’re not sure the sentence survives contact with it.

“You are the best part of my week.” It comes out plainer than you mean it to, simple as fact with no decoration on it at all. “Every week. Not just tonight–every single one. It sounds a little pathetic, but I’m drunk, so.” A small, helpless laugh, half into his shoulder. “So there. Now you know.”

“I look forward to Tuesdays because that’s your late shift, and I know I’ll see you before anyone else does. I’ve never told anyone that either.”

You stare at him.

“That’s not fair,” you say. “I say one nice thing, and you immediately say a nicer one back; that’s not–that’s not how this is supposed to work, Spencer. You’re supposed to just take the compliment and be normal about it.”

“I don’t know how to be normal about you.”

You don’t even try to compose yourself first. You duck your head straight back down and hide the whole helpless shape of your smile against the wool of his cardigan, pressing your face into it like you could keep it there, as if it’d leave a mark that lasts past morning.

“I’m not going to remember saying all this tomorrow,” you say, softer now, muffled, watching the traffic pass. “Not clearly anyway. So I need you to remember it for me. Just–keep it somewhere. For both of us.”

“I remember everything you say to me.” His voice comes out low, close to the crown of your head. “That has never once been a problem.”

The cab arrives sooner than you’re ready for it to. Spencer opens the door, and you fold yourself in ahead of him, and he slides in after, close, knee to knee, and gives the driver your address. The cab pulls from the curb and the bar’s light slides off the back window, and you watch it go, the shape of the night changing before your eyes. 

You have crossed out of the warm, loud room into something quieter, something down to just the two of you and a stranger's radio. Every door has been removed from the house of your mind, leaving you loose-lipped and every room of you exposed to the hallway.

Words spill out of you without filter or order. Your tongue is clumsy. Sentences start in one direction and veer wildly into another. More than once you catch yourself saying his name just to feel the shape of it in your mouth, soft and necessary.

The streetlights come through the window in long slow sleeps, up over his face and off again, up and off, like something breathing. Twelve minutes into the ride, you become aware of a situation. The need arrives sharp and sudden, impossible to ignore. You shift in the seat, legs pressing together, and Spencer’s head turns to you.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to pee,” you announce, Spencer. I have to pee right now.”

He leans forward and speaks to the driver. “Pull over at the next block, please. Anywhere with lights.”

The cab noses into the curb outside a stretch of shuttered storefronts, and Spencer is out and around and opening your door before you have located the seatbelt release. You mutter a soft string of oh no, oh oh no’s under your breath, and you half-fall onto the sidewalk, Spencer’s hand steady at your elbow. The street is quiet save for the distant rush of traffic and the soft click of Spencer’s shoes as he follows.

“I love you,” you say, because the only thing louder than the need in your bladder is the need to tell him. “I–I love you. I love you so much, Spencer–”

“I know. There’s a place on the corner, come on–”

“I don’t think you do know–”

“I know enough to find you a bathroom,” he says, and takes your hand, and steers.

The corner place is closed. The next one is closed. There is a bar with a bouncer who takes one look at the two of you and says, not unkindly, sorry, bathrooms shut, and Spencer opens his mouth, and you drag him away by the sleeve.

“Don’t argue with him. Spencer, I will die out here.”

You end up hurrying down a side street, half running, the two of you, past a laundromat and a shop that sells only lamps, and you are laughing so hard by the third block that it is actively making your situation worse, and it makes you laugh harder. Spencer is saying don’t, don’t laugh; you can’t laugh right now, and the not quite rain is beading on both of you like frost.

You two stumble upon a diner, twenty-four hours, humming under fluorescent light with three people at the counter and a waitress reading a magazine. A hand-lettered sign is stationed in the window that reads: RESTROOMS FOR CUSTOMERS. You are through the door immediately.

You are standing in the little back hallway by the payphone that hasn’t worked since the nineties with your hand flat on the restroom door. You push the door open six inches. You look at the tile and let it swing shut. 

The room is very bright and small with only one stall, one sink, and a fluorescent light that hums, doing its gentle work. Spencer has stopped a polite distance back down the hall with his hands tucked away in his pockets, waiting. 

You turn around and lean your back against the door. “I can't,” you say, voice small, “will you come in with me? I need–moral support. Emotional support. Please.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He steps inside, closes the door behind him as best he can, and the tiny room shrinks around the two of you, fluorescent lighting making everything look slightly unreal. You can smell the industrial soap and the faint tang of old pipes. Spencer’s presence fills the remaining space like something safe.

You shuffle into the stall, still mostly dressed, and in the thirty seconds that follow, there is a comedy of errors performed for an audience of one. Spencer stands just outside the stall door, close enough that when you reach out blindly, your hand finds his. He takes it without comment, and his fingers are warm and entirely steady.

You hover, and the relief that follows is profound.

“I love you,” you murmur, staring at the scuffed tile between your shoes, Spencer’s hand held tight in yours through the small gap in the stall door. “I love you in the way that makes the rest of the world quieter.” Your voice cracks on a sudden rush of drunken tenderness, and suddenly everything feels too big and too soft and too true.

“I love you in the way that makes me want to keep every version of you I’ve ever met.”

Spencer’s thumb moves across your knuckles, infinitely gentle. “I’m right here,” he says softly. “Take your time.” You finish and stand on slightly unsteady legs. The stall door opens, and there he is in all his glory, still holding your hand, looking at you with an expression so open that the light suddenly feels too kind. 

He briefly releases you to let you wash your hands, then grips it again when you reach out. He does not let go while you dry them on rough paper towels. He does not let go when he moves to open the bathroom door, then he offers his arm as if the entire interlude has been nothing more than the usual.

Outside of the restaurant, the night has grown cooler, the cab is gone, Spencer already has his phone out, calling for another, but you are still leaning into him, still talking in soft astonished fragments about the shape of his hands and the sound of his voice and the impossible fact that he stayed. 

The city moves around you in quiet streaks of light, and your bladder is empty. Your heart is not, and Spencer Reid is walking beside you through the dark with the same steady patience he brings to every impossible thing.

 While others bent and blew away on autumn's careless breath, he was the flower that stayed, one stubborn bloom that chose to stay past summer, past the rest. No grand parade, no fanfare bright, just quiet, patient grace–a single splash of fading light still holding to its place. The frost came close but hadn’t won; the stem, though thin, stood tall, for some things don’t leave when summer's done. Some things don’t leave at all.

The new cab takes longer to arrive than the first one did, or maybe it only feels that way because you are now tired after a night so full. When it pulls up, Spencer opens the door for you before the driver has fully stopped, and you step into the back seat; he gets in after you and gives your address for the second time tonight, laying it out carefully so it won’t chip.

You don’t speak much on this second ride; instead, you fade in and out of consciousness. You occasionally watch the city go by doubled in the window, streetlights unspooling over wet asphalt, and you somehow find that your head has ended up against his shoulder again; it is simply that the shape of you knows how to be next to him.

You smile into the wool of him, and the meter ticks, the radio murmuring something low and forgettable, and the fire in your chest, banked now, quieter, is not gone; it burns on low, warming you from somewhere underneath the exhaustion.

The taxi slows, and your building comes up on the left, rising out of the dark, several floors of brick with a dying hedge out front and a security door that’s been broken since March. The not quite rain has thinned and simply hangs in the air and gets you wet by attrition, patient about it.

Spencer pays and comes around to open your door. You take the hand he offers and climb out onto the wet sidewalk on feeble legs. The night air feels cooler now, sobering you in the gentlest way. You lean into him as you climb the three flights of stairs, and every time you miss a step, his hand is a constant, steadying presence at your elbow.

At the door, you fumble with your keys. They jingle uselessly in your fingers, a wind chime for an audience of two. You try the lock several times, the metal refusing to cooperate with hands that no longer remember the exact angle required. Spencer waits without argument, and you stand there with your hand on the keys, and behind you the street is doing its quiet nothing, tires shushing through the wet.

Twenty years of a locked room finally leaning on its own hinges.

“Spencer. Will you have sex with me?”

You turn around to face him in the entryway, your porch light casting everything in soft amber, moths writing their small frantic cursive around the bulb above you. He does not speak at first, but the silence isn’t empty, and it stretches long enough that you can hear the city breathing three floors down. When he does speak, his voice is quiet.

“Why me?” he says.

Not why. Why me. As though the second word were the one that bears the load, as though of all the strange things standing on his doorstep at night, the strangest was being chosen. He has spent his whole life being the answer to questions nobody meant to ask him, and he cannot fathom being the answer to one somebody did.

He is the only room in the world you have never wanted to leave.

“Because I trust you. Because you’re the only person on earth I’ve never once had to be careful around.”

He is exceptionally still, and somewhere below, a car passes and takes its light with it.

“Why now?” he asks, and it is so gentle, a hand held out to something skittish.

In the wordless dark where you keep the oldest things, you look down at the keys in your hand, and then you look back up.

“Because it’s the one thing that’s left, and nobody got to it. Nobody took it from me,” you say. Nobody took it. Like a thing that thieves come for, something you have been sitting up with night after night, in a dark room, with a shotgun across your knees. “Everything else about my body was decided for me, and I’d like to be the one who decides what happens to it. Just once, I’d like something to be mine to give.”

Spencer has always known where you keep your ruins. You had let him stumble into your chambers years ago, and he’d admired what you’d hung there for company–the pinkish hues that adorn your interior, the cherubs, the cherry trees, all that painted springtime. You gave him a tour like a docent. You whispered him lovely lies, immersing yourself in the fairy tale you’d created, praying to whatever god that still took your calls that he wouldn’t ask why the deepest corners of you smelled of rotting flesh.

He never asked; that's why, eventually, you let him see the corpses that rot behind your innermost door; a hundred versions of you that lie dead and unburied, every version of you that didn’t survive intact. You had told him the bones of it, the version every fairy tale warns the girl about: you were six, they weren’t, they were family, it went on for three years, and now you’ll never get to be little again. 

Let me give away one room on purpose, before someone finds a way to steal that too.

He doesn’t say I’m so sorry, or any of the other useless things that people grab for. He doesn’t reach for a statistic, though you can see one pass behind his eyes like a fish under ice. He just says your name, and holds it with both hands.

“Ask me tomorrow,” he says, and you blink.

“That’s not a no,” he says, before your face can finish falling. “I need you to hear that. It isn’t a no, but you’re drunk, and I–” a breath, “--if this is real, it will still be real in the morning. Real things keep, and you deserve to be asked back by someone sober, and to answer as someone sober, and I deserve to know it was you asking and not the tequila. So ask me tomorrow, if you still want to, and I’ll say yes tomorrow.”

“You’ll say yes,” it comes out small. Six years old and standing at the top of the stairs.

“I’m saying tomorrow,” he says, and an almost-smile plays at the corner of his lips. 

In this moment, the one that the night has been saving in its breast pocket, he reaches out and takes the keys from your unresisting hand, and he unlocks your door on the first try. He doesn’t hand the keys back right away; instead he folds them into your palm, and closes your fingers over them, and holds your closed hand between both of his, there under the porch light, in the wet gold air, moths keeping their frantic vigil.

“Thank you for trusting me with it,” he says quietly. “I know what it costs you.”

You lean forward and press your forehead against his sternum, and his chin comes to rest on the crown of your head, and for a moment the two of you just stand there in the doorway, one warm shape against the cold, and the fire in your chest puts out one last long ember of light.

“Goodnight, Spencer.”

“Goodnight.” As you step inside, as the door begins its slow swing between you: “Drink some water. Tuesday’s my favorite day, by the way. In case you don’t remember tonight, somebody should keep that for both of us.”

The door clicks shut, and you stand in your dark apartment with your keys in your hand and your heart does something unsupervised, and outside you hear it–the sound of him not leaving yet. He waits on the landing until your deadbolt turns, and only then, footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, growing fainter—a man walking home through a city laid out twice, carrying your question somewhere safe until morning.

Hermes wore wings at his ankles for this, someone quick enough to carry what the heart was too slow to say itself. He carries no arrow, asks no wound to prove it true; he is only faithful–delivers the word from the mouth that trembled it so into the hands that carry it now. So let him come tonight, sandals worn thin from the errand; he sets the message between you and holds it with both hands. He does not linger for thanks; he only delivers, and trusts to the ones who stayed.

The message arrives, and the night keeps it safe until morning, nothing intending to be spent.

Tomorrow comes, as it always does, indifferent to what it's been asked to hold. 

You wake with an ache and a sense of dread.

Will you sleep with me?

In the merciless light of a hangover, with your mouth tasting like a bar rag and your skull feeling like something borrowed and returned late, the question is still there, sitting where you left it. Sober, you look at it and don’t flinch.

You go through the motions of early day; you shower, feed yourself, and sit at your kitchen table with the file you’re meant to be reading and read the same line four times without it going anywhere. At eleven, you stop pretending you’re going to get any work done and call him.

He picks up on the second ring.

“Good morning,” you say

“Good morning.” You can hear that he’s somewhere quiet, his apartment most likely, a book open somewhere nearby that he has no intention of getting back to.

“It’s tomorrow,” you say, “my ask hasn’t changed, but I wanted you to hear it in the daylight.”

There is a pause on the line. “Okay,” he says finally. “Yes.”

You go quiet, and he clearly cannot stand it, because a second later: “You’re supposed to say something back, you know. That’s how phone calls work.”

“I’m processing.”

“Process faster; you’re making me nervous.”

“You don’t get to be nervous; you already said yes.”

“I can be nervous after the yes. Nobody said that the nervousness had an expiry date.”

You laugh, too loud for eleven a.m. in an empty kitchen. “I missed your neurotic rambling.”

“I wasn’t rambling.”

“You said, and I quote, ‘the nervousness had an expiry date.’”

“That is a complete and grammatically correct sentence.”

“It’s insane, is what it is.”

“You called me at eleven in the morning to reconfirm you want to have sex with me, and you’re critiquing my grammar.”

That shuts you both up for a second.

“Okay,” you say slowly. “Since you wanted to say it out loud first,” a breath, “yes. That’s still the question; I called to ask it again, properly, so–I’m asking. Will you sleep with me, Spencer?”

“You already asked me that.”

“I’m asking again; sober counts as its own ask; those are the rules, I don’t make them.”

“You do make them, actually; you made that one up right now.”

“Doesn’t make it wrong.”

He goes quiet, and you can hear him smile. “Yes,” he says. “Still yes, ask me again in a year, and it’ll still be yes.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” “I’m being thorough.”

“You’re being a lot of things right now.” “Name one that isn’t true.”

You don’t have an answer for that, so you deflect. “You know you never actually asked me.”

“Asked you what?”

“The same thing. I asked you twice now, and you’ve just been saying yes both times like it’s a pop quiz.”

There’s a brief pause; you can feel him sit up straighter through the phone, the air on his end of the line changing shape.

“Fine,” he says. “Will you have sex with me?” “That’s not how you ask a question, Spencer; that came out like a threat.”

“It did not come out like a threat.”

“It came out like you were reading me my rights. Now ask me properly.”

He exhales, and when he speaks again, his voice has dropped the joke entirely, gone real. “Will you let me sleep with you because I want to–not because you asked first, not because it’s owed, not for anything except the fact that I would like, for once, to be the one asking instead of the one being asked.”

“Yes,” you say, all the teasing gone out of it. “Obviously yes. You’re an idiot if you thought that was in question”

“I like hearing you say it anyway.”

“I like hearing you ask.”

“Very romantic, Spencer.”

“I contain multitudes.”

You’re grinning again, the whole kitchen a warm hug around you. “So now what, are we just going to stand here–sit here, whatever–on the phone saying yes at each other all day?”

“I mean, I have the time.”

“Spencer, be serious.”

“We can go out on Tuesday and discuss the intricacies. We’ll go to the diner—the one with the milkshakes you love–at seven.”

“Are you going to bring your legal pad?”

“I refuse to confirm or deny–”

“Fine. Tuesday, at seven, bring your pad, bring your color-coding, bring whatever you need.” “I’ll bring myself, mostly.” “Good. That’s the part I actually want.”

Neither of you says anything for a second after that, and then you speak of nothing much at all, the weather, friends, work, and yet these words like crumbs still fall and feed you, plain and sure as that.

 No wisdom nor great aim needed, just voices, trading warmth for sound. The heart wants the same small nourishment the belly’s found. A joke retold, a sigh, a laugh, you fill the hours by half and half with nothing that you’re speaking of, and still you leave the table fed, though nothing wise was ever said. 

“I should let you go,” you say, and don’t move to end the call.

“You should.” “I’m not going to, though.”

“I know,” he says, “neither am I.”

And you stay there, the two of you, saying nothing into a phone line that’s carrying, for once, absolutely nothing but good news.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Tuesday finds you there before Spencer does, your arrival marked with the ring of a bell.

The diner sits on its corner, glowing like something conjured–pink neon, chrome trim, windows fogged something soft at the edges–stepping inside is stepping into the warm sugared middle of something. It smells of coffee and griddle butter and vanilla sweetness. You take the booth that is tucked in the back, with the cracked vinyl; you watch the door, and you win.

He arrives at 6:58 exactly, hair wrecked by the wind, scarf attempting to swallow him whole. He spots you and the smile that breaks over his face is the kind you want to fold up and keep in your pocket for the worst days.

“You’re early,” he says, sliding into the booth across from you.

“You’re earlier than me every single time we do this. I wanted to win just this once.”

“It’s not a competition.”

“Life is a competition,” you say, and he sets a legal pad on the table between you. You look at it, then at him, then back at it.

“There are tabs, and they’re color-coded, Spencer. You made a color-coded document about having sex with me.” “Don’t be so crass; I made a color-coded document about having a conversation about having sex with you,” he corrects, a man defending his dissertation. “The sex itself remains, at present, entirely undocumented.”

“You’re being an ass, at present.”

“I’m being a thorough person.”

You order the milkshake you always do; he orders a coffee that he will ruin with enough sugar to classify it as frosting, and the waitress calls you both sweetheart in a tone that includes you as a single unit.

The evening has that quality again–all that spun-sugar thin–all of late night pulled into threads and draped over the booth like something a confectioner left to cool. It catches on the chrome napkin holder, on the rim of his coffee cup, on the steam rising off the grill, and for a moment the whole room looks caramelized, edible, about to melt, dreamt up of neon and warm air and the two of you, sweetness with no architecture under it but faith.

“All right,” you say, nodding to the pad, “present your findings, Doctor.”

He flips it open, and there it is: two columns in his cramped left-slanting hand, headers underlined twice, yes, no, and beneath them, mostly white space, waiting.

“It’s empty,” you say.

“We’re supposed to fill the contents tonight, together; that’s the whole point of the structure.”

“You do realize that normal people just sort of figure it out as they go along.”

“Normal people have years of iterative trial data, and we have one Thursday and a controlled environment.” He uncaps the pen. “I’d like to stack the deck in your favor. Okay, first column.”

He starts easy–kissing–yes, obviously, established, field tested, and he writes it down anyway. You laugh at him for writing down kissing like it’s breaking news, hiding your smile in your milkshake.

Hands, next, hair, neck. He asks about each one plainly, no flinching, occasionally citing sources, because he is who he is, and strangely this is the least awkward conversation ever held in this diner.

“Above the waist,” he says, pen hovering. “Over clothes, under clothes, or both.”

“Both.”

“Below the waist.”

“Yes.” “Over, under, or both?” “Both, Spencer, we’re going to be here all night if you disaggregate every single one.”

“We have all night, that’s what the coffee is for.” He writes both in small, careful letters.

“You annoy me.”

“Mouths?” “What about them?” “Where are they allowed to go?”

You take a long pull of your milkshake, mostly to buy the two seconds you need to essay it with a straight face. Then you set the glass down, and say in a matter of fact tone: “Anywhere, everywhere, and with the same academic rigor you bring to literally everything else in your life. I’ve seen you speed read; I have expectations, don’t disappoint me.”

He chokes on coffee, a full ambush of the respiratory system, one hand flying up over his mouth while the tips of his ears go a red so immediate and total it looks almost medically significant, and he has to set the mug down and collect himself in stages, a man reassembling after a minor explosion. It is horribly entertaining.

“Noted,” he says finally, hoarse, and writes something you cannot read upside down, and when you crane your neck he tilts the pad away from you, prim as a schoolboy guarding a test.

“What did you write?” “It’s proprietary.” “Spencer.” “Column one is thriving. Moving on.”

But then he asks the next questions, and it’s. “What do you like?”---not where, not what’s permitted, but like, the word landing open palmed on the table between you and the machinery in you stalls.

“Whatever you want,” you say, automatic, worn smooth from twenty years of use.

He puts his pen down. “That’s not an answer.” “It is, though. I’m easy, flexible, whatever you–”

“I need the answer to come from you, not whatever part of you is telling me what I want to hear,” he says, terribly gently, and the booth is suddenly very quiet.

“I don’t–” you stop, try again, and the truth comes out smaller than you’d like. “I don't actually know what I like. I don’t have–nobody ever asked before, so I genuinely don’t know.”

“Okay,” he says, “then we’ll try things out. Everything in this column is provisional, subject to revision, revocable at any time.”

The laugh comes out of you sideways, “it sounds like you’re making my sexuality a rental agreement."

“I’m making it yours, the paperwork’s just how I flirt,” he says.

The second column is harder, the list of no’s. The word no has never once been structural in your life; every boundary laid down, hands walked over it like it was a welcome mat, until eventually you stopped laying them, because a boundary that nobody honors isn’t a boundary, it’s just evidence, proof you saw it coming and couldn’t stop it anyway. It is easier to have no walls than to watch them fail, easier to be easy.

“I don’t know how to fill in that column,” you finally say, voice lacking armor.

“Then we’ll practice. Tell me no to anything; it doesn’t matter what.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Wonderful, it's ridiculous, tell me no anyway.”

The milkshake sits between you, whipped cream leaning, and he reaches for it slowly.

“No.”

The word is out before his fingers touch the glass, and nothing bad happens. His hand withdraws, that’s all.

“No, you may not drink half of my milkshake, Spencer. I simply won’t allow it; you have done this four separate times since March.”

“You kept a list?”

“Of course.” He laughs, and something in the sound washes the last of the weight out of the booth, and the column suddenly doesn’t look like a wall on it, only a door, and only your hand on the knob.

After that, entries come easier, though it is not many–two, three, small ones, a word you’ve always hated, a thing you’re not ready to think about yet, filed under not yet, instead of never.

“Last section, words that mean stop.”

“Can’t we just use stop?” “Stop works, and always will, but sometimes, people freeze on the ordinary words, or the ordinary words get tangled up in–other things. So we pick one that has no history, a word that’s never been in the room with you before.”

You think about it. “Banana boat,” you decide, and at his look: “Yes, like the sunscreen. I want the emergency exit to be something that makes me laugh.”

“Banana boat,” he repeats, and writes it down, underlining it twice, “and a word for slow down.”

“Bookcase.”

He looks up. “Absolutely not.” “It’s load-bearing, Spencer.” “You are never letting that go, are you?”

“It’s load bearing for the entire organizational system of the room.”

“Fine,” he says, “bookcase. I hope you’re happy.” “Very. Next should be lights.” “Lights,” he agrees. “On, off, or low.”

“Low,” you say, the answer coming easy from somewhere true: “I want to be able to see you.”

“There’s a lamp in your bedroom, the amber one, far corner,” he says, because of course he has your apartment layout memorized, “We’ll use that one,” and it goes on the list, your entire Thursday assembling itself line by line in his careful handwriting, a structure built from words alone.

The rest of the hour spends itself the way the best ones do–on nothing. He tells you about a book on medieval marginalia and does the voice of the monks, which you will never once let him live down. You build a profile on each of your cats, and he asks serious follow up questions, and you laugh so hard that you put your forehead down on the cool fornica. 

The waitress refills his coffee twice without asking, and you steal one of his onion rings, and he watches you do it and says nothing at all, just smiles into his mug.

“We can meet on Thursday,” you say when the plates are cleared, and neither of you has moved. “My place at seven.”

“Okay, Thursday,” he agrees, and doesn’t write it down, because some things get kept in better places than paper.

When you finally step out into the world, the neon follows you through the glass, laying its pink and blue down across the sidewalk, and he walks you to the corner with his legal pad tucked under his arm like a hymnal and his shoulder knocks yours every few steps, not by accident.

Let it stay spun, just a little longer; you will carry it home whole, cupped in both hands like something bought at a fair, too delicate for the walk, carried anyway, because some nights you decide melting can wait, because some sweetness is worth the risk of losing it between here and the porch light. Holding something that might not survive the walk is better than never having carried anything sweet at all. 

It stays spun just a bit longer, it does.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Thursday dawns eager and golden. You go on with the familiar motions of your day. You go to work, eat lunch at your desk without tasting it, and somewhere around four o'clock, between one case file and the next, you look up and realize that your hands have gone still and your mind has already walked three hours ahead of you, standing at your front door.

You have been rehearsing this moment more times today than you’d ever admit out loud, standing at the door, opening it, what your face is supposed to do, and nothing prepares you for how ordinary it feels when the knock comes at seven exactly, three sharp raps.

“Hi,” you say, opening the door.

“Hi,” he parrots, and you close the door behind him; the click of the lock feeling less like a room sealing shut and more like a held breath finally let out, the sound of the world being asked, politely, to wait outside for a while.

For a while, you just talk about ordinary things–the case that closed Monday, a movie neither of you has seen, but have strong, competing opinions about. It helps, Spencer, laying a path of solid ground for you to walk across, one ordinary sentence at a time, a long steady runway.

Eventually, the ordinary conversation runs its course, and there is a pause neither of you rushes to fill, and both of you understand, without saying so, that this pause is where the evening turns. 

You end up on the couch eventually, close but not touching, a careful few inches of cushion between you, and you look at him.

“Come here,” you say, and he does.

You close the last of the distance yourself, and kiss him, catching the shape of him still warm against your mouth. He makes a small, startled sound against your lips, and then he’s kissing you back, smiling the whole time.

His hand comes up slow to cup your jaw, and his mouth goes slower, deeper, and you feel everything, everywhere, all at once: the ground tilting slightly under you, every nerve in your body reorienting itself around the single fact of his mouth on yours. 

He kisses you thoroughly, and when you finally pull back for air, he chases you half an inch before he lets you go, eyes still closed, breathing hard with one hand braced flat against the couch cushion like he needs it there to stay upright.

It builds from there, slow and unhurried, his hands finding their way into your hair, down the line of your spine, resting warm and open at your waist like they’ve always belonged here. 

You lose yourself in the physical certainty of him–the low sound that catches in his throat when your fingers slide beneath the hem of his shirt and find bare skin, the way his whole frame sways toward you like something magnetized, off balance, half a breath from tipping over.

 When you press closer and drag your mouth along the line of his jaw, he goes entirely boneless against you, a full-body shiver working down through his shoulders.

“You,” he manages, voice rough, “are going to be the death of me.”

“Good,” you murmur against his throat, feeling him swallow hard under your mouth. “I like you unsteady.”

He laughs, breathless, and kisses you again, deeper this time, and you feel it in the soft scrape of his teeth against your lower lip, in the warm, clean smell of him, the way his hands start to wander, mapping you out slow and careful.

Somewhere in the tangle of it, you end up moving without quite deciding to, mouths barely parting, moving up and toward the bedroom, his hand finding yours in the dark hallway like it’s the easiest, most natural thing in the world for your fingers to lace through his.

The bedroom is dim, lit only by your lamp, and a streetlight coming soft and gold through the blinds, striping the ceiling in long amber bars. He lays you back against the pillows like something he intends to be careful with, following you down, his weight braced on his forearms so that none of it presses down on you all at once, just settles, warm and welcome and entirely within your control to push away if you wanted to.

You don’t want to.

His hands find the hem of your shirt eventually, the question folded so gently in the motion it barely registers at all, and you nod and lift your arms, letting him pull it over your head. It lands somewhere on the floor behind you, forgotten immediately, because his eyes have gone soft and adoring in a way that makes you feel, for one unguarded second, entirely beautiful. And then the second passes.

He will peel you back like an orange, thumbnail finding the seam you spent twenty years keeping hidden, and the rind will give way. Underneath is not sweetness, not the bright wet flesh the mouth goes looking for. You built a whole orchard's worth of skin to keep this moment from happening, and his hands are already at the seam, how easily his knife finds the give. 

Opening is not sweet, juice on the chin, a mess worth being made. Hands once held you like you owed them this, pressure, squeezing till the quiet came out worst; now every hand feels like it wants to eat the parts of you you’d rather leave kept away. You want to trust the fruit is still good news, but you know that he will find what rots in the deepest parts of you, what lies underneath your bruise.

Your arms move, curling in slightly, instinctive and small, not quite covering yourself but close, some old posture your body remembers even when your mind has mostly moved past needing it. 

Spencer notices immediately, and his hands go still against your ribs, patient, and he pulls back enough to actually look at your face, steady attention.

“Hey,” he says low, “we can stop. Say the word, and we’re done for tonight, no explanation needed, nothing owed to me or to anyone.”

“No–I’m okay. I promise I want to keep going. Please.” Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to.

Something moves behind his eyes; he studies your face a moment longer, searching for whatever would tell him you’re saying this because you mean it and not because you think it’s what he wants to hear, and whatever he does or doesn’t find, he decides to trust you, the way the whole plan was built to let him.

“Okay,” he says softly, “I’ve got you; tell me if that changes, and I mean at any second.”

The kissing starts again, slower now, his mouth finding your jaw, your throat, the ridge of your collarbone; he’s trying to prove something to your skin that words alone could not manage. You reach for his shirt in turn, fingers a little less steady, and he lets you work the buttons open one by one, watching your face the entire time, breaking every few seconds into a soft private smile, before he leans back in to kiss you again.

His shirt joins yours on the floor, and his skin is warm underneath your palms, the long lean line of him lit gold and amber by the streetlight. You let your hands wander over his shoulders, down the plane of his chest, along the soft trail of hair leading beneath his waistband. 

He kisses you like it’s the only thing he’s ever wanted to be doing, his hands mapping slow, careful paths against your skin, learning where you like to be touched, where you flinch. You lose yourself in the golden stretch of it, the drag of his mouth, the low sound he makes when your hands find his hip. The two of you move together, entirely wrapped up in eachother, the whole apartment gone quiet and golden and safe around you.

There is nothing left between your mouths but breath and the soft, wet sound of wanting. You can feel the rabbit-quick hammer of his heart and the fine tremor that runs through him every time your fingers map a new inch of skin. 

His hands slide up your back, careful over the newly bared skin, tracing the line of your spine, learning a new language he has only ever spoken in dreams, your bedroom reduced to the quiet rush of blood and the taste of him.

You kiss the corner of his mouth, then the hinge of his jaw, then the pale column of his throat where his pulse beats wild and visible. He tips his head back to give you more, the trust its own kind of heat. Your hands find the waistband of his pants, and he lifts his hips to help you. Fabric slides away until there is only skin, long and pale and trembling under your touch—the evidence of his wanting apparent.

You settle over him, the heat perfect against the softest part of you. The kiss that follows is deeper than any that came before, mouths open, tongues sliding. His hands roam with tenderness, over the curve of your waist, the undersides of your breasts, the skin just below your ribs. Then one palm settles low on your stomach, the touch loving, the same careful reverence he has given every other part of you.

You are six, and the hands that press there are not his. They are smaller, meaner, sticky with something you were too young to name. The weight is wrong, too heavy for the size of the body doing the pressing, too sure of its right to be there. A slow, spreading filth blooms under the place where the palm rests, glitter trapped beneath hot flesh unable to ever be washed clean, grown into the meat of you. 

A vicious fine, ground into the hot, soft flesh of your belly by hands that did not care what they left behind. A thousand tiny, glittering barbs trapped under skin that is still too small, still too warm, still trying to reject the foreign glitter of other people’s want. Their hands are still on you, and they won’t come off, catching on every ridge and fold, refusing to be rinsed, sparkling with malice every time the light of a new touch finds them.

You feel dirty in the places no soap can reach. The obedience rises, the small frozen stillness of a child who has already learned that struggling only makes it last longer. The body remembers what the mind was too young to file away properly, and it remembers here, in this inch of skin, heat stored in a struck match, dormant, never extinguished all the way down. 

You know that Spencer is safe, some clear steady part of your mind insists upon it, the way it might for the color of the walls, or the day of the week, an anchor thrown down and holding even while everything above the waterline goes dark. 

You know it's him, you know his hands have never once given you reason to flinch from them, but your skin cannot seem to tell the difference. The weight of his palm has reached down into a much older layer of you and found the wiring crossed, already primed to be hurt, years before he ever touched you at all, years before anyone should have.

He feels the change the instant it happens and his hand lifts as though scorched. Both palms come up to cradle your face instead, thumbs brushing the wetness that has already started at the corner of your eyes.

“Hey,” his voice is quiet, “hey, I’m right here.” You don’t answer. You are not sure, in this moment, that you fully exist to answer with.

“You’re here in your apartment. It’s Thursday night. I’ve got you.” The words are not empty; they are facts he is willing to repeat until they become true again

Slowly, the ceiling resolves into your ceiling, and you can feel your own ribs again and the breath moving through them. You become aware, gradually, of your own hands, of the fact that they’re shaking.

“There you are,” he says softly, when your eyes finally focus on his instead of through them. There’s no relief performed, just steady welcome, a man opening a door for someone he’d have waited at all night if he’d needed to.

You start shaking harder once you’re back in your body; a return to yourself is its own kind of shock, and your face is wet, and you don’t remember deciding to cry at all, but you are, quietly, your breath catching and breaking against him.

“What do you need right now?” Spencer asks, “Do you want space, or do you want to be held? Both are allowed.”

You can’t answer in words yet; you just blindly reach for him and he’s there instantly, easing his weight off you and gathering you up against his chest instead, tucking you into the space beneath his chin like he understood without needing to be told exactly how small you needed to feel allowed to be right now.

“No. Don’t stop, I’m fine. I can do this. I want–” The sentence frays and the ghost weight is still there, pressed into the soft give of your stomach even though his hand has long since left you, their hands still stuck. Tears spill over, sudden and hot, and impossible to swallow back, and you have never once felt so ugly. “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. I don’t know why–I’m sorry, I’m sorry–”

He gathers you in, arms wrapping around your bare back, one hand cradling the back of your head so you can hide your face against the warm skin of his shoulder. You sob into him, and the sound is raw, broken, your body crying for someone who wasn’t him. 

Somewhere in you there’s still a mouth that cries the way it did before you learned to speak, not words, just sound, the kind that magnifies into the dark. How quickly your body forgets all the years you have lived and becomes something newborn and wailing. 

A baby doesn’t know that calling’s wrong; it just knows empty, and it knows how to reach for warmth with everything, so long as breath allows. Yours is reaching even now; it mistakes his gentleness for that first hour, and cries the way it did before it came to understand that even if you make yourself loud enough, no one will hear you and make it stop. 

Somewhere inside of you, the baby keeps calling, keeps believing that this time a mother will come through the door, gather her up, cover what should have never been exposed, and say, I heard you, I hear you, you can stop crying now.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he murmurs into your temple, over and over. “Not for this, not for any of it. We stop. That was always the rule; I’m right here.”

You cling harder, fingers digging into the thin muscle of his back, face pressed into the place where his neck meets his shoulder. The tears keep coming, ugly and helpless. He does not rush you; he only stays, solid and warm and breathing, while the worst of it moves through you. You just stay there, folded against him, his heartbeat steady, his hand moving in patient circles against your back, and you let yourself be held by someone who isn’t going anywhere.

The crying runs itself out slowly, diminishing waves, each one a little further apart than the last, until you’re just lying there against him, wrung out and quiet, his breathing going steady like something that has never once considered stopping.

Neither of you moves to get dressed, or moves at all, and his hand keeps up its slow orbit against your back, and the apartment holds the two of you, a cupped palm holding water, knowing it can’t keep every drop.

“Yesterday was the anniversary,” you say, finally, into his chest. “Of the last one. The most recent assault.”

His hand pauses for half a heartbeat in its circling and then resumes.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I don’t really make it a habit of telling anyone. I don’t like giving it a day. It already took one year–it doesn’t get to have this day every year in this month.” You breathe out something that wants to be a laugh and doesn’t make it. “That’s why I wanted it to be tonight. I wanted to put something good next to it on the calendar, close enough to touch. I thought maybe if tonight went right, then next year, when the date came around, I’d have somewhere else for my head to go.”

He doesn’t say anything, just keeps holding you, and somehow the not-saying is the thing that makes it possible to keep talking, the silence on his end functioning like an open door.

“And the stupid thing is, it’s not even the last one I think about. Every year I brace for the date, and the date comes, and my head just–walks straight past it all the way back to the first. Like all the others were just echoes and the first is the only bell.” 

You pick at a loose thread on the pillowcase, needing your hands to be doing something. “I think that when I was six, something went wrong with me that day. Not just to me, but with me, like something got switched or rewired because it never stopped after that. It just kept happening –different years, different places–like–” your voice thins, and you push through it, “-- like there’s a bright neon sign on my back that says: vacancy, open all night, ready to be abused, and they just keep reading it and pulling in.”

You lift your head off his chest so you can look at him, and your voice comes out harder than you intend, but you don’t soften it, because it’s honest, and tonight seems to be the night for that. “It always finds me. Once is bad luck, twice is terrible luck, but it just kept happening, Spencer–how does that keep happening to one person unless there’s something in them that calls it? Unless they’re marked somehow?”

He is quiet for a moment. You watch him reach for a statistic, something about revictimization, about predators selecting for the exact stillness that earlier predators trained into a person, watch it get all the way to the back of his teeth, and watch him set it down.

“The common factor in a string of robberies is never the house,” is what he says instead, quietly. “No matter how many times it gets broken into.”

You look at him for a long moment. Then you put your head back down on his chest, because it's easier to say the rest of it to his sternum than to his face.

“Tonight was supposed to be the good one,” you say. “That’s the part that kills me. I’ve never–I have never once in my life been touched in a way that was for me. Twenty-six years old and every hand on my body was taking something—every single one. I don’t have a–a reference point. Other people got years of good touch first, hugs and hand-holding and clumsy teenage kissing; they got to build the whole house on a good foundation, and I got–I got what I got, and then nothing, so there’s just this gap where a whole education was supposed to be. Tonight was supposed to be the first page of it, and for a while it was.” Your voice cracks, and you let it. “It was, wasn’t it?”

“That part was real,” he says, and there is no theater in it, nothing performed. “Nothing that happened after cancels it. It happened, it’s yours, it’s on the calendar now, next to the other thing, right where you wanted it.”

You cry a little more at that, quietly, the tears running sideways across the bridge of your nose and into his skin. He lets them land without wiping them away, like they have as much right to be there as you do.

“I–” You take a breath, and it shakes on the way down, and then you say it, something kept in a jar so long you’re not sure it remembers how to fly. “I think there’s something missing in me that the rest of the world has, some–organ everyone else got issued at birth, whatever it is that lets people be touched and loved. Whatever it is that made every other girl in my high school someone you take to prom, and made me someone you–” you stop, redirect. “I’ve never been on a date. I've never been kissed before–actually kissed, chosen-kissed. Never had a boyfriend, never had anyone try. There has to be something underneath, something they can smell. Whatever’s missing in me, they can tell. Animals always can tell when another one is wounded and nobody wants to build a house on ground that’s already caved in once.”

“That’s not–”

“I’m not done.” He stops completely, and you feel his arms tighten. “I feel so weak, Spencer, all the time. I feel powerless. Other people have had it so much worse. I keep telling myself that. I did everything I was supposed to: I told someone, I’m in therapy, I did the worksheets and the grounding and the reframing. I tried so hard to heal the little girl who got left in that room. I tried to grow her up, to make her safe inside me, but she’s still there, and she’s still so small. My body still remembers like it happened this morning. I still feel dirty, like something was taken. I can never get clean again, and I don’t even feel like I’m allowed to feel this bad; it could’ve been worse. People carry heavier things.”

“Doing everything right doesn’t buy you out of hurting. I wish it did. I wish that’s how any of this worked,” he says quietly. “You survived something–” “I didn’t survive anything.” It comes out sharper than you mean it to.

“I’m not–I don’t mean that the way it sounds,” you say, backing away from your own edge. “I know what you’re trying to say. I know it’s meant kindly. Everyone says it: my therapist, my friends, you’re saying it now–survivor, like it's a medal, something in me that fought and won. But I don’t feel like that. I just–endured it; I wasn’t given a choice in the matter, and I just feel like that’s not surviving; it’s just still being here afterward, which isn’t the same thing no matter how many people want it to be.”

“Okay,” Spencer says. No argument, no gentle correction, just–okay. His hands wrap around yours, and he lets your framing of it stand exactly as you gave it to him without trying to sand off the parts that make other people uncomfortable. “You get to decide what to call what happened to you. That’s not mine to assign. If victim of circumstance is the truest word you have for it, I’m not going to trade it out for one that makes me feel better. I just wanted you to know that I see what it cost you to still be here.”

Something in your chest loosens at that, a tension you didn’t fully register carrying. “I hate her for it. Me–her–whatever. I hate myself so much, and it’s so easy–it never once gets tired–I hate every ounce, every liter, every gallon of me. There isn’t a denomination of me I don’t hate. I hate the way my hair curls at my nape, I hate my stare, I hate the way that my teeth line my gums, I hate how my voice sounds. I hate how quiet I go. I hate that I never screamed; I only let out a soft no as if that would make them stop, but I didn’t scream not once, not one single time in three years–what kind of child doesn’t scream? I hate the way I look in photographs; I have hated it since I was seven. There is not one photo of me as a child where my smile touches my eyes, and I hate that I’ve checked. I hate that I fold. I hate that I love so much and so fast, like a dog that’s been kicked and still runs to the door. I hate that I’m jealous of every person who got a boring childhood, with nothing to report. I hate how each time that I talk I cannot help but think that you are screaming for me to stop. I hate that I cannot find any part worth loving.”

The room is very quiet when you finish, and your own breathing sounds enormous.

“I’m not going to spend tonight arguing with twenty years I’d lose, and you’d feel unheard, and the hating would just go back in the jar, but I am going to disagree quietly. You should know that I’m doing that. The whole time you were talking, every single item on that list–I disagree, even the times I didn’t say so.”

“That’s such a lawyer answer.” A sound comes out of you that’s half sob and half laugh, wet and involuntary. “I still feel like her, sometimes. I have a badge, and an apartment and a job, and none of it touches the part of me that’s still small. I’ve tried to go back and comfort her, tell her it wasn’t her fault, hold her hand through it, and some days it almost works, and then a hand touches me, and it's like none of the work ever happened at all.”

“You’re still allowed to hurt. I wish I could give you a schedule for this, tell you that everything will be better by a certain date, but I can’t.”

“That’s not very comforting.”

“I know,” his voice is gentle, apologetic. 

You lie there for a while. “I’m still her,” you say quieter. “Some days more than others. Today, a lot.”

He presses a kiss to the crown of your head. “I know. I see her too, sometimes, when I look at you, and I think she deserves better company than she’s had.”

You don’t say anything; you just press yourself into the warmth of him and let yourself be held. The night stretches elastic between the two of you. 

“I can still feel their hands,” you continue, voice thinner. 

Fresh from the wrapper, they peeled you open and feasted upon you as if you’d been the sweetest candy. They’d whisper the sweetest words to you, before chewing you up and spitting you out like a piece of gum that’s stale in flavor. 

You adorn gorgeous wrappers, and beg to be seen again, pull it back and you won’t say no this time, anything to be looked at again; to be loved again–so you glitter still beneath the foil, soft and yielding, offering the last sugar-dusted edge to any hand that would reach, praying that the next bite might remember the sweetness you once were before the world grew tired of the taste. 

You wonder when your body became an offering laid at the altar of please, please, please, please don’t stop wanting me. Still, beneath every beautiful wrapper, there is a part of you that remembers being bitten into before you ever offered a taste.

“I have lived twenty years in a body that still keeps the appointment they made with it. The hands are always there: when I try to fall asleep, when someone stands too close in a grocery line, an accidental brush of a shoulder. I forgot about it right when it stopped, when I was nine, and I wondered why I was always left wanting, why I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. There was a stretch of time where I couldn’t make myself step into the shower because the water felt like another set of hands.”

You feel the little girl inside you go very still; you are still six and twenty-six.

“I started to remember again when I turned thirteen, and it came back in pieces. I wish I could forget it all over again. I wish that it never happened at all. I thought if I just kept surviving long enough the ache would get bored and leave, and when that wasn’t enough I stopped trying that too. I struggled a long time with surviving.”

You take a breath. The ceiling stripes hold still and listen.

“I wet the bed until I was fifteen.” It comes out in a rush, ripping the bandage. “I used to set alarms–two in the morning, four in the morning–so my body couldn’t betray me while I slept. I hid sheets and did laundry silently at three a.m. Nobody told me it was–that it’s a thing, that it happens to kids like me. I didn’t find that out until I was twenty-two, in a library, in a book I was too ashamed to check out.”

The gum is still being chewed, and you are the flavor that’s running out.

His arms tighten around you, careful, and he says nothing. You cry once more, no flood breaking, just a quiet overspill.

“I had cereal that morning, the first morning it happened. The good kind with the toy inside.” You laugh, humorless. “And after, I remember going back outside, and the sun was just hanging there in the sky. I guess I was confused that the world hadn’t done anything; there were no sirens, no thunder, nobody’s face changed. I had dinner that night, spaghetti, and I ate it, and I kept waiting for something to mark it. A day like that should have had weather; it should have rained something biblical. Instead it was just–blue. Regular blue.”

The sky did not flinch. It wore the same quiet blue it had offered to birthdays, grocery runs, and morning jogs, as though the world had misplaced nothing at all. Beneath its placid gaze, something sacred was unstitched, a flower plucked before its time. 

“I think that’s the part I’ve never forgiven the world for. The world that let it happen under a completely ordinary sky, on a day that otherwise did its job perfectly. Somewhere that same day, someone fell in love for the first time, someone got a promotion, all of that happened on the exact same day, under that same sky, like the day had enough room in it for all of it at once.”

He’s quiet, listening in the way he always has.

“All of that was years ago. The alarms, the bed, the shower, I stopped, I built a life, I did everything I was supposed to do. On most days I thought the distance was real, that it was behind glass now, look but it can’t touch you, and now it’s not behind glass at all. It just hurts so much, aching like it happened yesterday, like it's still happening.”

You are tissue paper and milk teeth and forty pounds of trust; a child's body–a thin soft melt on three boys’ tongues. Consumed; no resistance possible because there’s no substance to resist with. They took you up like the sacrament of nothing, three of them, family, older, larger, sure. 

Melting was the only property your body had been issued. No teeth marks, just a thin soft dissolve on three tongues across three years, consumed like the consecrated–ritually, with everyone else in the house facing forward, eyes closed, as though something holy were happening.

“When I think of myself at six, I will think of this, pliant, and ready to be abused. Once, I could–a child can be ambushed once; no one blames the deer for the first set of headlights, but it was three years. A thousand days, and somewhere in that thousand, there had to be one day, one hour, where I could have said something, told someone, made it stop. I didn’t. I just kept showing up small and quiet. That’s my earliest self.”

Spencer shifts, slowly, until he can see your face. There is no careful receiving stillness; there is grief with its sleeves rolled up.

“It was not your fault,” he says slowly, evenly, giving each word its own floor to stand on. “Not the first day, and not the thousandth. There is no version where a six-year-old is the one who was supposed to stop it. Six-year-olds are supposed to be playing outside; scraped knees, chalk on the driveways, losing teeth the ordinary way and putting them under pillows. Learning to defend yourself intimately is not on the list. That was the job of every adult in that house, every single one, and every single one of them failed you, and the failure is theirs. It never transferred to you; it doesn’t transfer to you retroactively because you got older and learned bigger words for what happened.”

You take in every word, and you can feel that he means every word, that this isn’t recitation, that he has thought about this–about you–with the whole enormous machinery of his mind, and arrived here, at this, certain. 

It doesn’t help. You know he’s right; you could recite it to another person and mean it with your whole chest.

“I know,” you finally, “I know it and hate myself anyway, both at the same time. That's–I think that’s just where I live, Spencer, on the corner of those two streets.”

He doesn’t argue, but you watch him want, with everything in him, to say something that would move you off that corner, and watch him understand that, maybe not tonight, and maybe not for years.

When the next truth comes, it is one you have carried longest.

“I just–I just feel like I’m not the kind of girl you love,” you say, the words barely more than breath against his skin, “I’m the kind of girl you prey upon.”

He goes very still under you. 

“There’s a difference, and I know where I live. Some girls get built into wives and valentines and someone’s whole future, and others get built into opportunities. I used to lie awake wanting to know why; that was the big question I had for years, the one I was going to ask if I’d ever got them in a room: why me, what was it about me, what invitation must I have been writing without knowing the language.” You laugh, one gray breath of it. “And then somewhere in my twenties I realized I already had the answer. I was young, I was naive, I was available, that’s it; it was never even about me. I was just the softest, most convenient thing in the room. I wanted there to be a reason because that would have made me matter, even like that, and there isn’t one.”

The city is as quiet as it ever gets. You are newsprint, and flour paste and forty layers of someone else’s hands; a shape that did not choose itself, wound strip over strip until wet paper forgot it used to be a page, a list, a letter someone might have read, torn without your say-so.

“Predation is a fact about a predator.” He says it the way he’d testify on the stand. “It’s not a fact about you, or how quiet you were or how little you fought or how available the room made you. The responsibility lives entirely on the side of the one who chose to take. You were never the reason.”

You hear it, and you want so badly to believe it on your own behalf.

“I want out of her sometimes,” and it comes up from somewhere very deep and old. “My skin, I want to unzip the whole thing and step out and be somebody else for twenty-four hours; a day is all I ask—one day in a body with no history. I just–I hate it, I hate it all. I hate that I wasn’t protected enough. I hate that no one noticed. I hate that I hate my abusers much in the same way that I hate myself: wholly, and completely yet not at all.”

What comes up out of you then is not more grief; it is anger, it arrives sudden and total, pressure dropping across your whole body, and it is clean, this is pure, it burns clear. 

“I was a child, and my body did everything it knew how to do to say something is wrong here, and every adult in that house just kept facing forward. I was owed a wall of grown people between me and the world, and they fell short. Three years, in one house, three of them, and you want me to believe nobody saw? Nobody heard or said anything, counted the sheets, asked about the showers, wondered why the smiling stopped?”

“Yes,” Spencer says, “you were owed that, and they failed you, and I have nothing that can make that better.”

The anger burns another minute, then banks–not gone, it never will be gone; that is maybe the healthiest thing you own. You close your eyes, and the lamp hums softly; his heartbeat continues its quiet count under your cheek.

The sun clears something out beyond the buildings, and the first true light of Friday comes through the blinds and lies down across the bed, across his hand on yours.

The tears return, and they are almost gentle, because here, at the bottom of the night, you find the thing you weren’t expecting to find: not healing, nothing so grand, just a floor—a place where the falling stops. You might never feel better, not fully, not the way the pamphlets promise. What was done to you was a violation with no bottom to strike and no exit to walk out of; you will be forty and it will rain and the bone will ache; you will be seventy and a smell will find you in a grocery store, that is not the tragedy of it anymore, for even old wounds still ache, and the ache is allowed. You can stop bringing your pain to court; you can just carry it, in whatever weather comes.

Old stars flare beneath your ribs, and you feel impossibly young, but morning always finds you older. Settling beneath the skin like falling constellations, their light crushed but never quite extinguished; you grow around them anyway. You are a hundred small burning things crowded into one small chest, a body of crushed little stars.

A/N: The anniversary of my most recent assault just passed, but for some reason I’ll always go back to the first one. I was six, and they weren’t, and now I’ll never get to go back to being little again. I think it hurts worse because it was just like any other day; the world kept turning, yet mine ended that day. I have a lifetime worth of memories, yet one of my first will always be this, and it hurts more than you know. I go to therapy and do everything I’m supposed to, but it still hurts so much; even old wounds still ache, I suppose. Now I write Spencer Reid fanfiction to cope.