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Spencer could be funny about touching. He didn't do it a lot, casually: he tended to avoid shaking hands, and his personal space bubble was about twice the size of anyone else Austin had known. And he didn't do a lot of casual hugging or anything else.
On the other hand, when they were sleeping in the same bed, she wound up what her mother called "teddy-beared" (not that she would ever, ever tell her mother this, but some things stuck with you from one evening when your mom'd had too many cocktails and was talking about things you didn't want to hear, as a thirteen-year-old). And he didn't seem to mind when she decided to hold hands, and given a couch they were both on, he pretty much gravitated over into cuddling, or didn't mind when she did.
Which pretty much meant she started thinking of Spencer like a cat: I want to be petted, but not right now. That fit with the way he slept, and the way he ate (where "meals" were something other people had, but all-day snacking was the natural order of the universe); she wasn't sure if that made it natural that he got along with Bart better than any of her other boyfriends ever had, or whether that made it amazing.
He was sitting on the couch, speed-reading through what looked like a class text, because for Spencer, degrees were like those little monster things Austin's nephew liked, and you had to catch them all. Austin curled up beside him with an orange and an unabashedly terrible historical romance, and caught the edge of a smile just as she was about to settle.
"What?" she demanded, pushing herself up on one arm.
"Nothing!" Spencer looked guilty. "Nothing."
"Liar." She poked him in the side. "You're laughing at me, you have to tell me why."
It wasn't that Spencer couldn't lie. He just wasn't very good at lying to people he liked, as far as she could tell. He squirmed a little, and said, "It's really nothing."
Austin raised both eyebrows at him. "Uhhuh," she said, and waited.
"I was just kind of noticing that you're like your cat?" he offered, and there was no way he could know why she wound up making the choked snorting sound she made. "Just, any time I sit down, you wind up curled up next to me? Or kind of on me."
" . . . are you complaining?" Austin asked, even though she knew he wasn't.
"No!" he said, eyes widening. "No, not at all, I was just noticing, and the congruence - "
"I'm teasing you, Spence," she told him, relenting. "If you minded, I think I would have noticed a while ago. But I'm not the cat," she informed him, settling back down so she could lean her head on his shoulder.
"No?" he said, and he was settling, too, and she shook her head fractionally.
"You are," she told him, flipping through to find her place. There was the moment of thoughtful silence (which would be accompanied by Spencer Expression #23, but she didn't bother looking), before he answered her.
"On what grounds?" he asked, sounding genuinely puzzled. Her mouth quirked.
"I said so," she replied, and there was another silent pause.
"I don't think that counts as a logical argument," Spencer noted.
"Self-evident premises don't require logical arguments to establish," she retorted, quoting him back to himself nearly (she thought) word for word from something they'd argued about on the phone last week.
Austin was pretty sure she had Spencer Expression #14 (the one that said "the human being I am dealing with is not playing right" - it was hard to describe, but really distinctive) looking down at her, but she pretended not to notice, and eventually Spencer went back to his impossibly fast reading.
Which meant she was totally unprepared when, in revenge, he put an ice-cube down her back while they were making dinner.