Chapter Text
Doctor Spencer Reid didn’t have a large circle of friends in his life. In fact, many could argue his circle of friends was limited only to those that he had worked closely with at the BAU. And while his personality and life story seemed to be an enigma to even those around him, his close friendships were not a secret. But that was what he wanted everyone else to see about his life, because, in fact, he had one person who had remained a secret in his life since the day he had met them, years ago.
It was you.
You had become the one person in his life that no one else had come to learn about. And it wasn’t because he felt you needed to truly be kept a secret. Not at all. But it was by chance that he realized it felt nice to not have to explain to others the nature of your relationship, or how you even came to be acquainted in the first place. The biggest thing was, that there was no secret affair or scandalous happenings between you both. In fact, you were friends, simple at that. Nothing more, nothing less. Plain ol’ boring friends.
What would have made things a bit more difficult for Spencer, was if his publicly known group of friends from the BAU found out that he had an outside friend that he had not come forth with and introduced to them after all the years he had known you. It would, at this point, prove to be rather awkward and Spencer had stressed his concerns about the disappointment that he might receive if your relationship, as friends, were to be outed to them after all this time.
You really didn’t mind, though. You didn’t need his other friends’ approvals to feel comfortable in your part of his life. You were normally a loner yourself, and so the fewer people you had to interact with, the more content you were with your life.
As far as the first time you had met Spencer, it hadn’t been anything particularly strange or significant. One day you had been moving into your first apartment after you had graduated college, and the next day you had run into Spencer as you both happened to be exiting your places at once. He had said a casual ‘hello’ and you had responded with a small smile and a nod. Then you had gone your separate ways.
The reality of it was that your first meeting was subpar at best. The more meaningful moment in your lives that led you on the path to friendship happened during your fifth meeting. After the first meeting outside your apartment doors, you had run into the doctor a few more times. At the front desk when he was getting his mail, and then again on the street as you got out of your car and bumped him because you hadn’t seen him coming up the sidewalk from behind you. You even had come across him doing his laundry casually late one Friday night when most of the building had long gone to sleep.
But on the fifth time, you happened to accidentally come across him in a small local bookshop. He had been looking for an original copy of a book that had been translated into English but was having no luck since the original had been in Greek, and the local bookshop was limited in the books they carried. His conversation with the clerk piqued your interest and prompted you to step up and offer some well-meaning advice.
You had suggested looking online if he truly wanted a copy of the original and, to this day, you could never forget the absolute look of profound confusion that had crossed his face as he turned to you. He had looked at you back then like you had grown two heads. Of course, it wasn’t until a bit later, that you finally had learned he was old-school about many things, and the mere idea of ordering something online was alien to him.
At your insistence to help him, you had all but dragged him out of that bookshop and brought him back to your apartment where you used your computer to search up potential sellers on eBay. Days later, when he finally had a hard copy of the book in his hands, he thanked you tremendously and asked you to join him for coffee. And though you had sincerely considered the offer, at the time you had to be honest with yourself about just how much you hated drinking hot bean water, and so you turned him down. But with a certain ease that rarely came to you, you instead, asked him out to lunch, which he promptly agreed to.
The time and date had been set and then you found yourself, that weekend, chatting with him over lunch. Just you, him, and his 187 IQ as he spewed off random tidbits of facts and information pertinent to whatever topics you brought up. While the average person might’ve gotten annoyed that he suffered from such a severe case of word vomit, you found it endearing and fascinating. There was always so much more to learn about everything in life, and Spencer just seemed to radiate beautifully with the passion to teach others everything he had amassed in his infinite eidetic memory files.
Perhaps you have been able to bond well with him because of your lonely, minimal social lifestyle. As he had prattled on about the statistics of people who had been killed by a fork over the last several years, you had found that it was easy to chat with him when he rambled on, and you didn’t have to actively answer him as often as you had to with others. Letting him do most of the talking was nice and refreshing, and for once, you felt like you weren’t suffocating with the need for too many back-and-forth interactions.
From that day on, your friendship had only bloomed.
It had always been the small things between you that really sealed the deal on your friendship: him bringing you hot soup when you were sick, you helping him acquire a few more original copies of out-of-print books online. At the end of the day, it took you both a hot minute to realize you both were growing and developing your relationship, day by day.
Everything had been so incredibly casual, too, as your interactions grew. One day you admitted to him how he was becoming your best friend, and he agreed. The next day you took a step that you had never even taken with previous partners before; you exchanged apartment keys.
You had told him it was for any time he finally wanted to get his head out of the sand and join the digital world, because you had a laptop and other electronic devices that he wouldn’t fathom bringing home to his apartment, but in reality, you both knew it was just an open option for him to avoid the reality of coming home to his place after a particularly hard case. He’d get home so late sometimes he’d never have the energy to eat something or even change his clothes. And with you being a night owl all the time, you had no problem inviting him over after a case to make sure you fed him, got him to shower, dressed him, and laid him in a bed so that he wasn’t alone.
You really were just friends, but you knew that he would be hard-pressed by his coworkers if they knew of you and, how when he would come back after a bad case, he would be coddled and soothed and cuddled, almost like a child, by the grown-ass woman that you were. But luckily they didn’t know, because there was no pressure to have to explain that part of your relationship to anyone. It was just you and Spencer in the quiet of your apartment, hearts beating as one while you comforted him, his tall lanky body wrapped in your arms with his broad back pressed to your chest, while he stayed silent, which was rare and very unusual of him on any given day, until he finally slept.
When he handed you his key, he had said it was for any time you felt the sudden urge to want to try at loving “hot bean water”. You had laughed so hard at that, relieved. Spencer wasn’t purposefully funny, but sometimes he just said the darndest things that make you smile. Deep down though, despite the unintended joke, you knew that he was offering you a safe haven from yourself. Being the loner and social recluse that you were, he knew all too well that there were times the silence of your apartment was too much for you.
He saw right through you from the beginning, and completely, without saying anything outright or bluntly, had let you know he understood the depression and anxiety you suffered from. So, you immediately understood the gesture of him passing on the physical manifestation of his home security to you, was also his way of passing on the comfort and security his apartment could bring you on the days that you just needed to “get away”. Because, being that you were a social recluse, you didn’t have many places you could go that were lacking in people. His quiet apartment was the perfect solution to that dilemma, and you were grateful that he didn’t have to say anything out loud for you to understand his intentions.
That’s what made your friendship so special, you figured. The quiet, unspoken understandings of each other and the considerate actions taken to comfort one another. You were there for him as much as he was there for you, through the thick and thin.
Over the years, having gone through some seriously thick things together had only made that bond between you and him all the much stronger. And as time passed into years, you realized that Spencer was like a brother, a best friend, and there was only one true way to describe your feelings towards him; love.
You loved him, as simple and complicated as love got. Especially in the last year or so when you started to realize there was something else about the way you loved him that was more than just a friend or a brother. Something you couldn’t quite put your finger on.
It was something that, perhaps, spanned even the vast void between platonic and romantic love. You just knew it was special in your heart, the way you felt about him like a brilliant full moon on a dark night where the rest of the sky was devoid of stars. Where you were reliant on that moon to bask you in its soft, comforting glow so that you weren’t stranded in the pitch darkness. And there was no way to explain those feelings to others when they weren’t also standing in the ivory light of your moon. That love and those feelings just were, and you had long accepted them.
A part of you wondered if Spender had felt something similar, but you never asked. Not because you were afraid of his response or anything, but just because, if he hadn’t felt such a thing, you weren’t sure how you could go about explaining it to him. There were just some things that, despite his high IQ, Spencer still couldn’t fully wrap his head around and understand. It was always those things that dealt with non-scientific explanations that confused him the most. And when those things were brought to his attention, he had a terrible habit of falling down a rabbit hole, trying to understand them inside and out. But those things can’t always be fully understood from a logical point of view, and so that deep rabbit hole would always prove to be useless for him in the end.
He would continually dig and research such things, but you knew the only solution to truly understanding them was acceptance. And Spencer, being Spencer, usually never got to that point, because in his mind, the way his brain was wired, there was no acceptance until he fully understood something. So, in all your efforts to save him from another deep, useless rabbit hole, you never asked him about such feelings. Besides, it wasn’t necessarily all-important for you to ask him since you had found little ways of expressing those emotions towards him without confusing him.
Especially on nights like tonight, where you came home to him sitting on your couch, his back to you and his head bent down. As you hung up your coat and left your shoes by the door, you quietly approached him, knowing that he wouldn’t get startled if you reached out and touched him. He couldn’t have missed the sound of the soft bells you had over your door that had chimed as you came in. He couldn’t have missed the sound of your socked feet padding against the hardwood floor that ever so slightly creaked under your weight.
As you reached the back of your couch, dark emerald and rich velvet, you ran your hand across the cushion behind him slowly. Surely he felt the way the pressure of your hand shifted the cushion ever so slightly.
There was a book in his lap, one that you didn’t recognize, that was open to a page somewhere in the middle. He must have just opened it when you came in because you knew, very well, how fast he could read at 20k words a minute, but you found it odd that he was not actively flipping the pages. In fact, it appeared that he was just staring at the open book before him, not even taking in the words on the page.
It was even odder when he jumped slightly as your hand found its way onto his broad back. He was tall and your couch had a relatively low back, so when he sat on it, he stood out, literally, like a sore thumb, his middle back and shoulders sitting well above the cushions behind him. It was very unlike you, who could lean back easily and slide your head against the cushions, but, then again, you were almost two heads shorter than him, and he had a much longer torso-to-leg ratio than you did.
“Hey, you,” you said softly as you leaned forward over a shoulder so that he could turn his head and see it was only you. “Is everything alright?” you asked.
Your hand rubbed firmly over his shoulder blades. Your long hair slipped over your shoulder, and you watched his deep brown eyes trace the fall of your hair before they turned up to meet yours.
“’m okay,” he mumbled, his lips hardly moving. “Just tired.”
You studied his face for a moment, and though you were no profiler, you could tell there was something more going on. He wasn’t able to really hide anything from you after all these years. You knew his tells, the shifting eyes, the twitching of his fingers as if he needed to grasp something to ground him, and even, on the rare occasion, the way he bit his lip with a strange uncertainty. You knew he didn’t like to hide anything. It was always so much easier just to outright tell the truth. At least, that’s what he had admitted to you years ago.
“Spence,” you insisted softly, your hand running up the back of his neck, “please tell me what’s wrong.” His soft skin broke out in small goosebumps as your fingers combed upward into the unruly locks of his curly hair. He had, in the last year or so, let his hair grow back to the length he had it at when it had been brushing his shoulders. You couldn’t deny it was your favorite hairstyle for him.
As you worked your fingers into his soft hair, which had to have been washed not too long ago, because it still had some damp locks scattered amongst the fluffy dry ones, he turned to face forward and leaned his head back into your hand, closing his eyes and groaning lowly in his chest before he spoke up and answered you.
“The headaches are back again,” he admitted quietly, his eyes still closed as he enjoyed the scalp massage.
Your heart sank at his words, but you didn’t stop running the pads of your fingers into his hair. He had told you a long time ago how he loved when people played with it. He had relaxed a bit more since you had started, his pinched brows smoothing over and his shoulders falling slightly as he settled into a more comfortable state.
“I’m sorry,” you told him.
A brown eye cracked open and watched you. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
You shrugged and pulled your hand away from his hair as he sat up slowly again. “I just wish there was more I could do…Have you seen your doctor yet?”
He shook his head slowly and then winced as if the action alone hurt him. “I only just got in from this last case, but I promise I’ll go tomorrow.”
He reached behind and took a hold of your hand guiding you to walk around the side of the couch and tugging you to sit beside him. His hand was warm and his fingers mostly soft with the exception of a few callouses from his job. “Stay here,” he told you as he leaned into your personal space and tucked his head onto your shoulder, his cheek squished against your clavicle. The silky curls of his hair tickled your neck and you reached up and brushed back the hair that had fallen into his eyes, exposing his high forehead.
For a long while, you sat there in the quiet, just allowing Spencer to bask in your warmth. Surely if he was the moon for you, you were his sun, all warm and radiant compared to the darkness he had encountered with his job and in his life. You ran a firm thumb over his temple, and you felt him sigh against you, his soft, warm breath fanning across the skin of your neck and chest. The soft sweatshirt you had worn under your coat had a wide boat neck that left your collarbone and neck bare. Small goosebumps rose over your skin, but you suppressed the shiver that crawled up your spine.
When you moved to pull your hand away from his temple, his arm shot out and gripped your wrist loosely so as not to hurt you.
“Please,” he begged quietly, “don’t stop.”
You studied him for a moment, before gently pulling your arm out of his grasp and nudging him to sit up. He watched you, all the while, his eyes wide and pleading, much like an adorable puppy.
“I’m not going anywhere,” you assured him as you adjusted your position on the couch so that your back was pressed to the armrest, one leg folded in front of you, and the other bent over the edge of the plush seat cushion. “I want you to lay back in my lap.”
Realization dawned across his face and he visibly relaxed, turning to adjust himself so that he could lay across the couch on his back, his head fitted perfectly in the dip between your thighs. He folded his hands across his stomach and allowed his body to sink into the cushions below. His long legs were bent slightly, and his socked feet were propped against the far armrest. His height really made your couch look less like a three-seater and more like a loveseat.
“What now?” he asked, as he looked up at you, a smattering of pink across the bridge of his nose and cheeks. Dr. Spencer Reid never blushed for anything. You raised a curious eyebrow, but didn’t point it out.
“Just relax,” you told him as you smoothed your hands over his shoulders and slightly down over his collarbones.
Unlike you, however, he was dressed up to his neck in his normal button-down, tie, and cardigan combination, and well, that just wouldn’t do. You were very aware of his gaze boring into you as you leaned over him and started to loosen his tie. But your hands stilled altogether when he reached up and gripped both of your wrists this time.
“What are you doing?” he asked, lowly. There wasn’t an accusatory tone in his voice like you half-expected there to be, just a splash of curiosity.
“Do you trust me?”
He nodded.
“Then just relax,” you reassured him.
For a moment he watched you, eyes darting over every feature on your face as if he could read your thoughts just by looking at you, but you remained calm and collected under his heavy gaze, not allowing any sort of emotion to flit across your features. Not even for a second. Eventually, he let you go, drawing his hands back down to his stomach and closing his eyes.
You took his reaction as consent and reached back down to his tie and started loosening it further. You weren’t very skilled with ties, but you managed to wiggle it free just enough to expose the top buttons of his pale blue shirt. From there you slowly worked at each button, until you had managed to open the top three and were able to part his shirt open to expose just a bit more of his chest.
You ran the pads of your fingers over his now exposed skin, slowly and deliberately, working into the muscles there that connected to the muscles in his neck, drawing your slow kneading motions away from the direction of his heart. You didn’t know a lot about massages in general, but you had read about that detail somewhere. And at this moment, you praised the fact that you had been an artist all your life that had been fascinated with the human body, knowing where the muscles were, though you couldn’t name them all.
Beneath you, Spencer’s chest rose and fell softly with every breath he took. At some point, he had opened his eyes halfway, and he looked to be in a state of bliss, which you took to be a good sign. You worked your way slowly, dragging your fingers into the muscles up his neck; up the sides slowly, and then around under his head so you could draw the tips of your fingers into the muscles behind his neck, all the way from his upper shoulder blades into the bottom of his hairline. He groaned softly as you hit a sore spot just under his skull.
“Do you want me to stop?” you whispered, not wanting to completely break the peaceful quiet that had befallen you both.
“No,” he breathed. “I can feel that in my head where the headache is... It’s helping…”
You hummed and continued working your fingers over and over into that spot. You could feel the tension in the muscle on the right side compared to the relaxed muscle parallel on the left side. Slowly, with patience and determination, it eventually relaxed, and the knot disappeared completely.
“Just tell me if I hurt you,” you told him quietly.
He hummed in response, his eyes fluttering, still half-opened. “’kay.”
When you had finally deemed his neck and shoulders relaxed and fully de-knotted, you pulled your hands away briefly before reaching up and very lightly touching your fingers to his jaw. His breath hitched with a sharp intake for a brief second before he finally relaxed again. You ran your fingers up the sides of his face over his temples, pressing them into his skin and over his forehead drawing lines up towards his hairline. You repeated that same motion a few more times and then moved on to pressing your thumbs directly into his temples.
As you slowly increased the pressure against the little divots there, the crease between his brows deepened. You could tell that it was a bit painful for him, but he didn’t say anything or make any move to stop you, so you just kept going. After a bit more you stopped moving altogether, just sitting there with your fingers still and pressing into his skin. There was a beat of silence and then you slowly released the pressure, drawing circles over each side of his face. The pinch between his brows then lessened and grew shallower. You didn’t have to hear him say he felt some relief. His expression was confirmation enough. You moved on, pressing your forefingers into either side of the bridge of his nose, just under the inner part of his brows.
You did much of the same thing there, increasing the pressure until it probably hurt a little, and then you stilled for a short moment before you released it. A few times you worked that spot and then you moved your fingers up and out over his downward sloping brows, using your thumbs to pinch the skin there softly, working the small muscles.
You didn’t think too hard about the implications that what you were doing was rather intimate. Instead, you focused on helping Spencer relax even more into the couch cushions. His head in your lap was heavy, and after a long while, you realized he had, at some point, fallen asleep.
You smiled softly at the sight, no longer massaging his face. Instead, you brushed your fingers lovingly over his features, memorizing them fondly. Across his thicker brows, down his sharp jawline, up the middle of his jaw where there was a small divot in the center of his chin. You brushed the pads of your fingers lightly over his parted lips. They were soft and dark in the dim lighting of your living room. His warm breath fanned across the back of your fingers, and you traced invisible artistic lines up the straight bridge of his nose over his high forehead, and across the distinction of his hairline.
His wild and unruly curls fanned out above him over your lap and thighs and your heart stuttered at the sight. He appeared younger when he slept, especially with his hair brushed out of his face so that you could even see his ears. You sighed deeply and turned your head to look up at the state of your living room.
Books were scattered across the writing desk in the far corner, and several books on your shelves were tilted leaning up against others because of the lack of partners that belonged directly beside them to help hold them upright.
In a way, Spencer’s life was like those tilted books; surrounded by so many other books to lean on when one went missing, but you were the lonely book that he had been reading. He had placed it on the small lamp table beside the couch before he had laid down. It had no other books to lean against and instead, it laid flat, supported by nothing but itself. If there was another book beside it, it could lean on that second book for support, but with no other books around, it had to find a way to support itself, even if it wasn’t in the traditional way that its design had intended. You sighed deeply again, subconsciously running your fingers through Spencer’s hair gently.
“I hope you know how much you are loved by everyone around you,” you whispered into the quiet of the room.
When you glanced down again, a sudden flash of heat crawled its way up the back of your neck. Spencer had woken up at some point and was watching you with sleep blurred eyes. The brown was so dark you almost didn’t recognize it.
“I hope you’re not suggesting that you aren’t loved…” he said groggily, subtly leaning his head a bit further into your hand that was still buried in his hair.
You shook your head. “No, I—”
His quiet voice saying your name silenced you, and you met his soft gaze. “One day,” he said slowly, reaching up a hand to cup your face in its large warmth, “I’m going to introduce you to my friends and family at the BAU, and you’ll finally have more than just me to love you.”
Your heart stuttered in your chest again and you worried for a moment if Spencer had noticed. It took nearly all of your willpower not to lean further into his warm palm and to grab it with both of your hands to keep it pressed to your face.
“Okay,” you whispered, afraid that if you raised your voice any higher it would crack on your words and give away the sudden swell of emotions that had welded up from inside your chest and squeezed at your heart. It was almost scary how much you could have grown to love this man in your lap.
He smiled at you with his whole face, his teeth nearly blinding, and a bit of color returning to his cheeks. Even his dark circles seemed to diminish in his display of happiness. “You’ll finally get to see where I get all of my strange quirks from.”
You huffed lightly, a small laugh bubbling up from within your chest, but there was this taste of wet salt on your tongue when you tried to speak. Spencer watched you closely before he drew his fingers over the apple of your cheek collecting the wetness that you didn’t realize had gathered there. You didn’t notice you had started crying.
He chanted your name softly three times, before he sat up, pulling his head out of your lap and quickly turning to face you, reaching both his hands to cup your face in them. He radiated warmth and you leaned into his hold, reaching up to grasp lightly at his wrists with your smaller hands.
“You don’t have to cry,” he said, “I’m here. Right here with you.” You clung to his arms as another swell of tears rose up and spilled over, and a choked sob rocked its way past your lips.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “To befriend my friends so you can have someone around to love you when I’m not there?”
You nodded shakily into his touch. The way he held your face forced you to keep your head up and face his gaze, despite how much you just wanted to tuck and hide.
“B-but Spence,” you had managed to get out past the shaky wetness of your voice, “don’t get me wrong… You are enough for me, even though there’s no one else right now.”
He drew closer, studying your eyes, a strong sincerity in his own, and then he was leaning closer. You felt the blood drain from your face as you suddenly had a thought that he might try to kiss you in the way your mind was wondering, but then everything came to a halt. The world tilted for a second, further on its axis, and then snapped back into place, right where it was supposed to be.
Spencer’s forehead touched yours and you released the sharp breath you had taken in and held. Your eyes fell shut and you could smell the subtle scent of his shampoo swirling around you with how close he was. Everything around you homed in on the warmth he radiated like the sun. At this moment, you felt less like his sun and more like the cold moon relying on the sun’s light to chart its way across the night sky.
“I love you, you know,” he said so sweetly soft you could almost feel his words sweep over your skin like the brush of a feather.
He pulled you into a full embrace, his arms gathering you up, both your body and pieces, and bringing you together as he held on. You reached up and wrapped your arms around his broad shoulders and gripped the back of his shirt desperately needing to hang on to him to feel grounded. His long arms circled your waist firmly, his hands engulfing the sides of your ribcage, as he buried his face into the juncture of your neck and shoulder. With your hair down he had to have gotten a faceful of your locks, but he clearly didn’t care.
“I love you so much,” he repeated, his voice muffled against you. A hot puff of his breath billowed over your skin, leaving in its wake a line of goosebumps.
“I know,” you countered. You knew.
xXx
Prologue:
Neither you nor Spencer could pinpoint the exact moment when you had come to realize that your love for each other spanned beyond the platonic realm. Sometimes you wondered if it had been that night you had let slip, about hoping he had realized how much he was loved, but another part of you really wondered if it had happened long before that.
For Spencer, he suspected it happened all the way back to the day he first met you. That subpar meeting of souls outside your apartment doors that day. When your hair had been all but thrown into the messiest bun, and you had been wearing a shirt that was three sizes too large and dingy lounging pants that were stained with all sorts of art mediums.
When you tried to remind him that you hadn’t even said anything to him at that time, only a small smile and a nod before you left him behind in the hall, he laughed and waved you off.
“Who said you ever had to say anything to fall in love?” he asked, a giddy joy coloring his voice. He then had gone on a long rant about animal instincts and pheromones and the power of physical attraction on the chemicals in our brains. You had to just shake your head lovingly because he really was never going to change.
And somewhere along the way, you realized that no matter how much you thought you could love someone like Dr. Spencer Reid, every day taught you that there was always something more you could love about him. Just like with your friendship, it was always the little things that caught your eye.
The way he’d draw his lips into a tight line while shifting his eyes away from someone who had pointed out a tidbit of information that he found awkward, or the way he would come up from behind you and place a possessive hand on the back of your neck if he caught someone else staring too long or too hard in your direction at the local bar.
You always loved the way he listened to the little things that you liked and you especially loved when he went out of his way to indulge you. Like when you had admitted, flushed red in the face, that you found his long hair hot, all tied up and pulled out of his face. He still wore it down plenty when he went about his normal day, but at home, he always made sure to put in the extra mile and tie it back, “for your viewing pleasure”, as he had put it.
There are so many other things too, that you couldn’t possibly write them all down, because the more you grew to love Spencer, the more you realized it almost didn’t matter what he did, you’d love it regardless. At some point, you realized that even his flaws and imperfections were attractive to you. You just really hoped that that feeling he gave you when he was around, or when he passed into your thoughts would never go away. Because after all this time, you could start to imagine a life with him forever, and you didn’t want it to ever really end.
xXx