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They have a standing date that they don't talk about, because talking would make it too real. It started with a series of inside jokes, and then a confession, and somehow they ended up with this once a month dinner date, a home-cooked meal (by him) with records playing in the background (hers) and the fantasy that they are married, that this is a normal weeknight meal, and that they have normal weekday occupations.
For Prentiss, sex is too painful; for Reid, it was simply never interesting. But he wants to hold a girl's hand and feel like he belongs to someone, and she wants to feel safe to snuggle on the sofa without thinking ahead. They both like Italian food and old movies. Somehow it fell into place.
He makes up stories over carbonara about his job teaching math to high school students, bitches about how frustrating it is to explain the Pythagorean theorem over and over to kids who just don't care. If he'd only went for his doctorate, he'd be a professor, something really satisfying, but this Reid has a bachelor's degree and a teaching certificate, and a lovely wife of three years without a charming engagement story or a wedding. She laughs and the storytelling he weaves so effortlessly encourages her to make up her own life, one where she doesn't know how to hold a gun and doesn't know what real pain is like, only the mundane everyday frustrations like traffic on the beltway and whether she's too old to have kids and remembering to pick up the dry cleaning.
His story is always the same, always that math teacher, while she's a chameleon, one month an accountant, one a politician, a lawyer, a pollster, a housewife, a real estate agent. She tries on the roles like clothing, none of them fitting perfectly because she can't quite consciously admit that what fits is his arm around her shoulders, the ease of a late night movie and a bottle of wine. She really likes Reid, which is more than she can say for most people. Once a month she calls him Spencer and fixes his collar and adds more ground pepper to the alfredo he made for her. He asks her detailed, insightful questions about the life of whomever she's decided to be for the evening, and she answers and with his help builds a new persona, only to try again next time. It couldn't be all the time, none of this could fit into the uncertainty and routine trauma of their everyday lives, but she's coming to need it, and she gets cranky when work makes their night a week late, when her cell phone ruins the party.
Tonight, thank God, there are no interruptions, and she wears a sensible heel and they listen to Coltrane. "He forgot about the hypoteneuse," Reid groans, completely absorbed in a fabricated story about a 14-year-old boy named Oliver who chews gum in class. She sips her wine and smiles and slips off her shoe, reaches under the table to rub his ankle with her bare foot. It's enough to pretend.