Work Text:
Spencer is very much aware that he’s being unreasonable. Childish, Morgan might call it, if that were the kind of big brotherly love he was inclined to dish out on this particular day. Or maybe something less forgiving than that.
Except Morgan’s at a crime scene like everyone else so there’s no-one really around to check his mood.
The local uniforms, who are giving him a wide berth as he mutters at his whiteboard, definitely aren’t going to, too scared to incur the wrath of the FBI. Even if ‘the FBI’ is a guy wearing a stripy tie, a knitted purple cardigan, and increasingly mussed hair. And a gun. He does also have a gun.
And then you show up, carrying a takeaway cup of coffee, packs of sugar stacked on the lid, and a sandwich. You don’t say anything at first, just watch him leaf through folder after folder, clearly not finding what he’s looking for, checking labels on boxes and actually, honest to goodness, swearing. You WILL be texting Garcia about this, she loves a pottymouth. (And she loves Spencer, the combination might just make her combust.)
He senses your presence immediately, of course, but he ignores you. Because if he does, maybe you’ll go away, too.
“I have coffee,” you say finally. “I also have sugar for your coffee.”
Something in your tone makes him pause, you have your negotiator voice on. You want to make some kind of deal with him. Probably demand that he be reasonable, or that he apologises to the cop he yelled at an hour ago. He’s tempted to tell you he doesn’t want coffee, but he does. Desperately. Especially if it hasn’t come from a coffee machine that’s older than he is and has flakes of crusted limescale floating around in it. “Okay?”
You wait for him to turn and look at you before you continue. “You will get however many packs of sugar I think you deserve based on how convincing your smile is.”
No fucking way. Spencer shakes his head. Today is a perfectly good day to start taking his coffee black.
“Come on,” you say, grinning. Clearly finding his mood hilarious, which is annoying because he’s pretty committed to this stand he has taken, but maintaining it is NOT easy when faced with… you. “You can do it.”
He looks away from you. He knows if he spends too long with your smile in his eyeline, one will slip out of him. “What are you doing here?”
“Prentiss and I played Rock, Paper, Scissors over who had to go in and save the locals.”
“And you won. Lucky you. Great day to be a hero.”
You laugh and Spencer knows he definitely just lost, his lips curling upwards at the sound he got you to make. So he looks back at you to make sure you see it. He might as well get his sugar fix then.
Your laugh transforms to a smug grin. “Good boy,” you say, like he’s a golden retriever who just learned to fetch against all odds. (Whatever you want, he’ll get it for you. All you have to do is ask.) Then you set the coffee down on the table in the middle of the room, picking up the packets of sugar and then removing the lid. The steam wafts in his direction and he breathes in deeply through his nose, this sense of need spreading in him. He focuses on the coffee, the simplest thing in the room to want right now. Then, your eyes straight on him, you tear the first packet of sugar and slowly pour it into the coffee with a flourish.
Something about the way you’re doing it feels vaguely sexual to Spencer. He looks from the coffee to your face, transfixed, his Adam's apple bobbing. Not quite sure when he took his last breath or why he’d ever need to take another one. Then he realises he isn’t imagining it, you’re doing it on purpose. This is a performance. It’s a joke.
Because obviously you have no idea that half his thoughts are vaguely sexual when they’re about you - quite a lot of his thoughts are about you - and right now you’re feeding into some fantasies he could be trying harder to get rid of. As far as you’re aware, the two of you are just friends. Friends who once shared a bed and he nearly came in his sleep just due to the reality of you existing next to him, sure. But fortunately for the both of you, you don’t know anything about that, which is why you pour sugar in front of him like it’s the beginning of a porno.
You open a second packet and tilt your head instead of pouring.
Spencer realises he’s no longer smiling, his mouth hanging slightly open instead. Like a trained monkey, he smiles again, this time wide and deliberately fake.
You shake your head.
He sighs.
“Come on, Spence,” you say, encouraging him to try a little harder. When it doesn’t work, you put down the sugar and step closer to him, reaching up with both hands, sticking your pointer fingers into the corners of his mouth and forcing them upwards. Your nails are filed short, but are still just long enough that he can feel them digging into his skin. He’ll probably still feel them there tomorrow. Next week. When he’s 80.
If he wanted to, he could lick you.
He does want to, but he doesn’t do it. Wonders how fundamentally he would have to change as a person to be someone who did that. Wonders if there’s any version of him you would LET do it.
You smile. Not a real smile, more just showing him the shape of one so he can copy it, your eyebrows raised in question. You look like a demented clown and more than anything in the world right now, he wants to kiss you.
“Prentiss always opens with Paper,” he says, grabbing your hands and pulling them away from his face, hoping it doesn’t feel as desperate to you as it does to him. “Just for future reference.” Emily would have been so much easier to deal with right now. Your nearness is messing with his head in a way he got better at dealing with in the last few weeks, but today he just can’t filter through it.
(At work things are fine, Hotch giving himself the most obvious mental pat on the back for this whole teambuilding exercise he set up, shipping you off to North Carolina together to battle it out; JJ smiling and physically patting him on the back like he’s such a good boy for letting you in. (How none of you realise how good he isn't is a mystery to him.) You sticking to him like velcro, and him doing absolutely nothing to try to peel you off, addicted to your nearness and your smiles and the tinkling sound of your laugh by now.)
He doesn’t realise that he hasn’t actually let go of you until you pull free of his grasp. Then he takes a step back, mortified at the fact that he’s been casually, accidentally holding your hands in the middle of a police station. Well, in the privacy of a meeting room, but still. Inappropriate. “Sorry.”
“It’s not me you should be apologising to, Spence. It’s the rookie cop crying in the bathroom because you were mean to him.”
Spencer blinks. “He’s not crying.” He wasn’t that mean. Really he just pointed out some very obvious shortcomings in the local filing system in quite a loud voice.
“No,” you agree easily. “But I bet he wanted to.”
Spencer shakes his head at you and holds out his hand, hoping that if he demands it, you’ll give him the rest of the sugar. He won’t beg, it’ll set a precedent he can’t afford. Who knows what he’d get on his knees for next?
You shake your head, resigned, and he realises it actually worked when you pick up the sugar packets - all six of them - and put them into his outstretched hand. You’re giving up. Granules of sugar from the open packet spill into his palm, making him want to drop it all in the trashcan. He wants the sugar in his coffee more, though. (He wants you most of all.)
And then you’re leaving, walking to the door, throwing a grin at him over your shoulder. “If you need anything else, text Prentiss.”
“Hey,” he calls after you and you still, your hand on the handle. Part of him wants to ask you to stay. To help or maybe just to make him go a different kind of crazy. “You forgot your sandwich.”
“That’s for you. Just in case this is all about you being hangry.”
* * *
By the time Morgan turns up to tell Spencer they’re all going for dinner, he waves him off without looking up, nearly done reading through interview notes, the pattern he had been searching for all day - in documents that were mislabeled or misfiled to an extent that had him wondering if it was done on purpose or people were just that incompetent - finally emerging.
“I had a meatball sub earlier,” Spencer insists when Morgan pushes him to join them.
Which is how YOU end up outside Spencer’s hotel room two hours later, stomach full of Pad Thai, one hand poised to knock, a plastic carrier bag in the other. There was a general consensus at dinner that Spencer was being a little bitch (Well, there were Morgan’s words, which no-one really disagreed with, so.) and you had volunteered to go talk to him.
But now that you’re here, you aren’t sure you shouldn’t have left this job for Emily or JJ. They know him better, he’s tolerated them for longer. Considered them friends for longer. But you made a promise to yourself in a gross motel room in North Carolina that you were going to Make Spencer Reid Like You, and you are not a quitter.
It’s just, the fact that he’s been like this with everyone today and not just you makes it feel like a very different kind of problem than you’re used to having with him. You can’t just barge into his room and say, “Hey, dude, I thought we were cool now. What’s up?” and demand a fight.
Because you HAVE been cool, actually. And he didn’t kick you out when you brought him coffee. (Emily was even impressed by how well that went, this slow nod like she was working something out in her head, possibly putting you down for all future Spencer wrangling. Which is fine, you don’t mind. You kind of enjoy the way he lets you follow him around.)
You take a deep breath and knock on his door, reminding yourself that it could be worse. At least you’re wearing normal clothes in a normal way.
Spencer… is not.
He pulls open the door with his t-shirt half-on, half-off and you aren’t sure which way it’s meant to be going. From the look on his face when he sees you, he isn’t either. But then he pulls it down, the view you had of bare skin from his torso to the FBI Academy sweatpants hanging low on his hips disappearing before you can determine if he’s wearing anything UNDER those sweatpants or not. (Where were THEY when you were in North Carolina? Maybe you’ve both learned a thing or two about what to pack when travelling for work?)
You wonder who he was expecting.
“Hey,” you say just a little too brightly. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Uh.” He looks at you, focuses very intently on your forehead, you think. “No?”
“You didn’t come for dinner, maybe you have other plans?” WHY do you sound like a jealous girlfriend all of a sudden? “Are you getting ready to go out?”
Just, you’re in the middle of a case. Should he be… going on dates or whatever?
He stares at you like you’re insane. “I was getting ready for bed.”
Oh.
Right.
That makes sense also.
“Perfect timing, then,” you say with a grin and squeeze past him into his room without waiting for an invitation. You’re on a mission, after all.
Spencer turns and tracks your movements with his eyes as he slowly closes the door.
His room looks pretty much the same as yours, just with a different abstract painting above the bed. Similar colour scheme to the one in your room, probably something serial that was mass produced by someone with an art degree and student loans they can’t afford. All paycheck, no soul. Depressing as anything, for several reasons.
You drop the plastic bag on his bed and wait for him to say something.
He doesn’t. He’s leaning against the door, still holding on to the handle, and you aren’t sure if it’s so he can escape or so he can throw you out.
“Relax, Spence,” you say finally. “I’m not going to sleep here, I just wanted to hang out for a bit.”
Which isn’t something you do, at least not on your own. Sure, you’ve hung out with the team, nights out to celebrate a case closed, Christmas party at Rossi’s, and since North Carolina you’ve even talked to each other at these things, as opposed to you talking at Spencer and him walking away. But you don’t do anything only with Spencer, the way you do with Emily or Penelope. And you’ve definitely never come to his hotel room before.
You wonder if he’s worried you’re going to hit on him. Maybe he’s scared that you’ve come here to… NOT sleep in his bed?
You pick up the bag again and empty its contents onto the duvet instead, just to make your intentions clear. You are not here to sexually harass anyone, thank you. “I thought we could play poker.” Then, just to be COMPLETELY clear about the kind of poker you mean, you pick up the bags of wine gums. “For gummies.”
There’s a whole novel typing itself out across Spencer’s face while you talk, but unfortunately it’s in Russian and you have no idea what’s going on in his head. He still hasn’t spoken or moved since he closed the door.
“Spence?” you say, all the uncertainty you felt before you came into his room bubbling to the surface.
That seems to jolt him into action, shaking his head like he just woke up, before he nods. “Yeah, sure, okay. Gummy poker.” Like that’s not something you just invented in the candy aisle of the CVS around the corner 15 minutes ago. Maybe it’s what kids in Vegas play during recess to prepare them for the real deal?
He empties the small metal tray on his desk, removing the complimentary bottle of water and two glasses, and puts it down on his bed square in the middle and then he pulls a deck of cards from his messenger bag. Because of course he’s always carrying a deck of cards around with him. Probably in case he needs to do some emergency magic tricks.
“Nuh-uh,” you tell him and pick up the brand new deck of cards that fell out of your plastic bag along with the wine gums. “We’re not playing with your marked cards.”
He huffs, part amusement, part indignance. “My cards aren’t marked.”
“Suuuure.”
He rolls his eyes at you but accepts your new deck, still wrapped in plastic. He unpeels the wrapping with practiced hands, long fingers that know exactly what they’re doing, shakes the cards out of the cardboard packaging, discards the jokers, and starts shuffling the remaining cards, all while looking straight at you and not even glancing at his hands or what they’re doing. There’s a look on his face like you’re about to get absolutely rinsed and he is going to absolutely love it. (It’s a look you find yourself really enjoying for some reason. You like it when he gets cocky, you’ve just never been on the receiving end of that from him before.)
What you’re not picking up on is any hint of the pissy attitude he was so committed to earlier in the day. Which is good news, but also makes this whole visit seem kind of pointless.
Then he sits down at the head of the bed, folding up his legs so he’s sitting criss-cross applesauce with the tray directly in front of him. Taking a break from shuffling the cards he points to the other side of the tray, indicating that you should sit down like he’s inviting you to your own funeral.
So you take a seat, copying him. Then you start opening the bags of gummies, letting them drop on the tray (no food in Spencer Reid’s bed, thank you very much, yes you did pick up on what he was doing there). You hold up each type of gummy in turn, explaining their value, before you start dividing them up so you have the same amount. “Gummy bears are worth 1, worms are 5, sharks are 10,” you tell him. There’s an odd number of worms so you stuff one in your mouth.
He nods in agreement, watching the worm disappear between your lips. “So what are we playing?”
“Um.” You hesitate. “There’s more than one kind of poker?”
Spencer sucks in his lips like maybe he’s worried you’ll be offended if he laughs at you. You shift to pull out the handwritten note you’ve got in your pocket and show it to him. “I wrote down how the hands are ranked. Emily helped me.”
He looks at the note, your careful handwriting, the little drawings of what each hand looks like. “Emily knows you’re here?”
“Yeah. They all know I’m here.” You pull a serious face. “I was sent as a special envoy to negotiate a peace treaty.”
“And how’s that going?”
“Well, I’m about to lose all my bargaining chips in a game of intergalactic poker, but I’m hoping then you’ll take pity on me and sign the treaty anyway.”
You smile brightly and he smiles back at you, like maybe he thinks you’re funny or maybe he thinks you’re mad.
Or maybe it’s both.
“Okay. No Limit Texas Hold’em,” Spencer says, dealing you each two cards. “Those are your hole cards.” He points at yours. “You can look at them, but don’t show them to me.”
You look at the cards and then listen intently as he starts explaining the rules to you: how to bet, the flop, the turn, the river. You know all the words he’s saying, but not in the context of poker.
“Don’t worry,” he says finally. “It’s a lot simpler than it sounds.”
“Really? Because it sounds super simple,” you joke.
“Let’s just play the first hand and I’ll talk you through it,” he suggests.
It takes a couple of hands, but then it all starts to make sense to you. Spencer’s right, it’s not really all that complicated.
When he sees that you’ve got the hang of it, he divides up the gummies again so you can start from scratch.
“So this is it, huh? No more Mr. Nice Guy?”
“Why would anyone need to negotiate a peace with ‘Mr. Nice Guy’?”
You look at your cards. A pair of sevens. You wonder if Spencer stacked the deck and gave you this hand on purpose. Then you wonder if it’s actually a good hand or not. “I guess they wouldn’t,” you agree. It feels a little bit like he’s saying he’ll beat you at poker to make you stay in his room. Mean guys get negotiated with, nice guys get left alone.
If you win, you can leave.
He moves one gummy bear to the centre of the tray. Small blind, you think to yourself, practicing the terminology. You add two bears (big blind, yup) and then he puts down three cards facing up. The flop, which is a hilarious name to you so you smile.
“You need to be less obvious,” he says. “Don’t smile because you get good cards.”
You frown. You hadn’t actually even noticed what the cards were. There are three spades, but none of them are sevens so they’re of no use to you as far as you can tell. “Oops,” you say, your smile saccharine sweet.
Spencer frowns. “Am I being hustled right now?” He actually sounds worried, which is even more hilarious than the flop.
“Yes.” Your tone is flat.
He looks at you directly, really observing you in a way you’re rarely subjected to. As much as he tolerates your presence these days, mostly even seems to be fine with it (the occasional smile at something you say or do), he doesn’t really ever look straight at you for more than a split second. Mostly he’ll be looking at a point right behind your head, or maybe at your shoulder, and you always assumed he just doesn’t love eye contact and didn’t worry about it.
Being subjected to the full intensity of Spencer's gaze is… something. You’re not quite sure what that something is, exactly, but it’s making you want to fidget, adjust your shirt collar, rub your neck, anything to spread out the attention you’re getting. Instead, you keep both hands in your lap and look back at him. It feels a little bit like you’re being hypnotised.
You probably COULD look away if you wanted to, but you find that for some reason you don’t. Then his eyes change somehow, as if he’s adjusting his focus, and it’s like he goes from reading your mind to reading your soul. Your breath catches and you blink and look away.
In this moment, you think he could ask you anything at all, and you’d tell him the truth. Deepest darkest secrets that you managed to hug close during 9th grade Truth or Dare would just pour right out of you. He could ask you FOR anything and you would give it to him. An unlimited supply of sugar, his favourite seat on the jet, your firstborn.
If this was some kind of stand-off, you’ll accept that defeat. He can just take all your gummy sharks right now. (They’re sour, anyway, you don’t actually like them.)
But when you look at him again, he looks almost embarrassed, like he’s the one who just had his soul laid bare - or maybe just embarrassed for YOU by what he saw, how easy this was for him - and his eyes are fixed on the deck of unused cards.
There’s a blush creeping up his cheeks and he’s kind of adorable, which probably isn’t something you should be entirely so aware of in a coworker. The way ‘adorable’ sounds in your head not quite the same as when Emily called him that in a bar once when he missed his mouth with the straw because a woman was hitting on him.
You swallow, pick up three gummy bears and throw them in the pot. Then you realise it’s not actually your turn to bet, but he doesn’t say anything. About that or anything else.
He blinks, looking at the gummy bears and then at the cards between you, and then he smiles. Not at you, just to himself, but you still get to see it.
He taps his knee, considering, and then throws in a worm, taking out two bears, checking. Then he puts down another card, the turn.
The card is absolutely useless to you, and you wonder what you should do with your face to avoid him figuring that out.
“So you only have one spade. Interesting,” Spencer says, his voice low but definitely intended for you to hear.
Ohhh.
You can’t suppress the grin that spreads across your face. Maybe you ARE a poker genius and he IS being hustled?
You throw in one of the gross sharks and Spencer blows out a surprised huff of air.
“The probability of the river card also being a spade is less than 16%,” he tells you.
The probability of him letting you into his room in the first place was probably significantly less than that. “I’ll take those odds.”
“That was most likely a mistake,” he says, absolutely no hint of sympathy as he throws in a gummy shark of his own.
You tap your cards to let him know you’ll check. You’re pretty sure you’ve seen someone do that on TV. Spencer looks a lot less impressed than you think he should and just puts down the river card.
It’s the 7 of diamonds.
He pulls a face, mock sympathetic. “That’s too bad.”
Looking him straight in the eye like you’re a baller you throw another shark in the pot.
Spencer looks confused for a moment, you can practically see the wheels turning as he calculates, well, everything. He’s mainly focused on figuring out the cards, though, the statistical probabilities and every possible hand you could have. He isn’t actually looking at you, the whole eye-contact experiment apparently abandoned. You’re relieved but also kind of not, which is a little unsettling to realise.
Then he shrugs, his mind clearly made up about SOMETHING and he throws in a shark and a single bear himself, raising by 1.
Stubborn asshole.
You throw in a single gummy bear, calling his tiny raise.
Spencer pulls a face, the smuggest one you’ve ever seen, probably on anyone ever, and puts down his two cards. Both spades. “You have 3 of a kind, don’t you?” he asks, showing off.
“I think I hate you,” you joke, throwing down your two 7’s, and he laughs.
“I told you what my hand was,” he says as he collects his gummy winnings. “When I said that the odds of the river card being a spade were less than 16%. The only way that could be true is if I had two spades myself.”
“How’s that meant to help me at all?”
“It’s simple probability,” he says and you can tell that he’s getting caught up in explaining the math. He doesn’t say it like it’s a dig at you for not realising, more like he’s sharing information you don’t have and he thinks you need. “It’s really a very basic formula. All you need to consider is the number of known cards, the number of visible spades, and the number of remaining, unknown cards. I gave you the percentage, so to find the number of remaining spades in the deck, you just need to solve for X. And then you’d know that I had two of them. Easy.”
“Yeah, no, I definitely hate you.”
He looks a little embarrassed at first, or maybe worried that you meant it, but when you smile at him he smiles back.
“It’s your turn to deal,” he says. “Unless you give up?”
“Oh, no,” you assure him, picking up the deck of cards and shuffling them. “I still have gummies left to lose.”
Which you do, slowly but surely. You manage to win a couple of hands here and there, but somehow you never gain as many gummies when you win as Spencer does when you lose. Maybe because you’re really bad at betting and he’s a math wiz. Those are both possible factors.
“So what was going on with you today?” you ask. Partly because you want to know and partly because maybe you can distract him with conversation and make him less good at poker.
He looks at the three cards on the bed and then at his hand, considering. “Nothing. That was just some very frustrating evidence to sort through,” he says finally, throwing a gummy worm into the pot. “Alone.”
That last word is like an afterthought, or maybe it’s accidental, like he hadn’t intended to tell you that’s what he resented.
You throw in a worm of your own, not really knowing if that’s the right call or not. “So you wanted help? Why didn’t you just ask?”
He shrugs and lays out a fourth card. “Because then I’d be just as annoyed, except someone would be there to see it?” It’s a joke, sort of, self-deprecating but probably also how he really feels about it. Spencer is used to sorting things out by himself.
“So what?”
“So no-one needs to be subjected to that.” He glances at your remaining gummies and bets small, just two bears, to make sure you can keep up.
“Oh, come on,” you say dismissively, matching his bet. “Other people are grumpy all the time. I mean, have you MET Hotch?”
Spencer very nearly laughs at that, which feels like a small victory, poker or no poker. “You’re not grumpy,” he says, showing you his cards.
You throw away your own without showing them to him. “Oh, I’m definitely getting there.” You both know you don’t really mean it.
He smiles at that and picks out a gummy worm from the pot as he collects it, then hands it to you. “In case you’re actually just hangry.”
You narrow your eyes at him, mock-offended, but grab the gummy worm before he can change his mind and quickly shove it in your mouth. “But you’re done being grumpy for now?” you ask after you finish chewing.
He looks at you, quickly, one of those ‘blink and you’d miss it’ glances where your eyes meet before his change direction immediately, then he collects the cards and hands them to you. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” You shuffle the cards and deal another hand.
“So does that mean you want me to sign that treaty now?” The way he says it, you don’t THINK he’s asking you to leave, job done, he’s asking if you want to.
“Nah. I still have a few gummies left to lose.”
“And then someone’s gonna have to eat them, too,” he says, smiling.
“It’s the hard knock life,” you agree and he stares at you blankly. “Never mind.”
“I’m not really a fan of musicals,” he says after a beat. He might’ve had to dig deep for that reference, but he got there in the end.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” you agree. “They can’t be much fun to read.”
For that, he all but cleans you out. You have one single gummy bear left, and that’s only because Spencer bets so high you can’t match it and you have to fold rather than going all in. “Mean,” you tell him.
He shrugs, unconcerned, and offers you a shark.
You shake your head no.
“Wait, are you ACTUALLY grumpy now?” he asks, part fascination, part… maybe concern?
“No.” You grin. “I just don’t like the sharks.”
He takes a bite of it himself instead, tasting it. Then shrugs and eats the rest of it.
You shake your head in disbelief. “You drink your coffee so sweet it’s basically caffeinated syrup, but you like sour gummy sharks?”
“They get sweet after a bit,” he argues, defender of sour sweets all of a sudden. “I like the contrast. It’s complex, it has layers. It contains multitudes.”
“Be honest, Spencer. Are you profiling a gummy shark?”
“I’m profiling the flavour profile of a gummy shark. There’s a difference.”
“Riiight,” you agree like he’s an UnSub and you’re trying not to aggravate him in case he pulls out a knife and stabs you. He does have a point about the gummy sharks: they work as a metaphor for bad first impressions. You’re still not eating one, though, you hate the way they make your mouth shrivel up. Which is not a metaphor for anything, you have no intentions of eating Spencer Reid, nor will he be eating you.
You clear your throat as if it might help you derail that particular train of thought before it can go somewhere you don’t need it to.
Spencer looks at you like he’s trying to work out what you’re thinking and you avert your eyes. Now is very much not the time for him to try that mind-bending hypnosis stuff on you again.
He picks up the cards and starts shuffling them, not with any real intent, just for something to do with his hands, and you watch that instead. It seems safer than looking near his face. Except this is just as hypnotic, the rhythmic, steady motions of his hands moving, his fingers in complete control of the cards. (Your own shuffling is more ‘playing Whist at the retirement home with grandma when you were 9’, less ‘backup career as a dealer at the Bellagio’.)
A yawn catches you by surprise and you can’t suppress it. It feels a little bit like your body sorting out an escape plan you didn’t know you needed two minutes ago but which now feels somehow urgent for reasons you can’t quite articulate. “Right,” you say, slapping your hands on your knees like someone’s uncle about to get off the porch. “I did promise you I wasn’t going to sleep in your bed tonight, so I should probably go.”
Spencer looks startled, almost but not quite messes up the shuffling, but then he nods quickly, like you just said something that hadn’t occurred to him before now but he wants everyone to know he fully agrees with it. “Yeah. Um, consider that peace treaty officially signed.”
You get up from the bed and hold out your hand for him to shake. He stares at it, then collects the cards in his left hand and gets off the bed as well, shaking your hand when he’s standing in front of you.
“Pleasure negotiating with you this evening, Captain,” you say, feeling like the dorkiest dork, but somehow desperate to fill the silence and your touch with something light.
“Likewise,” he agrees, looks like he’s resisting the urge to rub his hand on the thigh of his sweatpants when he lets go of you.
You walk to the door at a pace that hopefully doesn’t look like you’re running away, and he follows you. Actually, he probably wants to make sure you’re really going.
“Okay, goodnight,” you say once you have the door open, already halfway through it.
“‘Night,” he replies, a softness in his voice that makes you feel completely transparent. Then you step into the hallway and hear the click of his door as it closes behind you.
You’ve learned quite a few things tonight, you think to yourself as you walk slowly past the three doors that make up the distance to your own room. Hanging out with Spencer is FUN, in a way that feels easy and already kind of familiar and in the way you somehow knew it would be all along, now that he’s accepted the fact that you’re a nice person actually and he doesn’t need to hate you. And also that with those eyes and those hands and that smile, he could be a real menace in a bar if he wanted to; you kind of get what Derek was saying after that whole straw incident, the way that woman looked like she wanted to suck up that club soda and dribble it into his mouth like he was a baby bird. Or not like that at all, really.
You need to get this train off the damn track entirely.
You consider knocking on Emily’s door when you pass it, just to give her an update on the evening’s proceedings and tell her you’re pretty sure things will be fine in the morning, but then you decide against it.
She’ll see for herself.
After the door closes behind you Spencer rests his forehead against it, breathing softly and pretending to himself that he’s not listening to your retreating footsteps as you walk down the hall to your own room.
When he’s sure you’re far enough away that you won’t be able to hear, he breathes deeply, exhaling on a sigh.
Well, shit.
Spencer knows with a certainty that matches gravity that he is deeply, pathetically in trouble. And the worst part is, he has no-one to blame for it but himself. Well, he COULD blame you, of course, but you have no idea you’re doing anything wrong (you AREN’T doing anything wrong) so that seems unfair, even to Spencer’s desperate mind.
He shouldn’t have let his guard down in North Carolina, he shouldn’t have let his guard STAY down when you came back, he shouldn’t have let himself get so comfortable around you.
He definitely - and this is the one he’ll really be beating himself up for - shouldn’t have let you barge into his hotel room and start talking about sleeping in his bed and smiling and then distracting him with candy and poker like that makes any of it bearable.
The fact that it all seemed so easy is no excuse for anything.
Just, the look on your face when he opened the door and there you were, when he half expected Hotch to turn up with a stern expression like a disappointed dad. The kind who doesn’t yell, just makes sure you know he isn’t pleased with your attitude.
(Spencer’s knowledge of what dads are like is mostly academic, obviously, but Hotch definitely has that whole vibe down.)
There’s something about the way you look at him, like you woke up one day and decided that the two of you were going to be friends and he really didn’t get a say in the matter any more. And he wants that, too, of course he does, because it’s not like he’s falling for you DESPITE your personality. He likes being around you entirely too much, whereas you like being around him just the normal amount. Mathematically, there is basically no way to explain the relationship between the quantities of your liking. Yours being the standard, 1, and infinite being a number that doesn’t exist outside theory.
The problem isn’t that you want to be his friend, the problem is that he wants so much more than that, and try as he might (he could be trying harder, if he’s honest) he can’t forget that. Mostly he can pretend, but showing up and just taking control of his room and his bed is pushing things too far. (The bed he was 5 minutes away from getting into while NOT thinking about you - this is a lie he can tell himself now, because it’s a hypothetical, a version of life that didn’t happen so it has the potential to be anything, even that.)
He thinks he mostly got through it unscathed, unhumiliated, though. Only two things snag on his mind, in very different ways, now that you’re gone and he’s eating through his gummy winnings to put off the moment when he DOES get into bed until maybe he can sanitise the whole place, rid it of your scent and the creases in the duvet where you sat. Irrefutable proof that you were in his bed. Or, well, ON it, anyway, but what’s a tiny preposition between a man and his fantasies?
“They all know I’m here,” you said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Both that you would be here and that people would know about it. To Spencer it seems completely UNnatural that you seek him out, but also that you don’t mind people knowing. It’s the difference between you, of course, that he feels guilty for what he wants and how much he wants it, whereas you have absolutely nothing to hide. From him or anyone else.
The other thing… Spencer bites into a sour gummy shark, chews until the acidity disappears, replaced by sweetness. (Spencer feels like a gummy shark, you don’t want that either. It’s a whole new level of pathetic; maybe he should reinvent himself as a Romantic poet and write odes about artificially flavoured candy. Suck on THAT symbolism.)
Poker felt safe and like you made an effort to meet him on ground that feels familiar to HIM (the fact that you didn’t know how to play, and still it’s what you came here prepared for, is something he can’t stop thinking about but also needs to stop reading something into, the millions of things he can convince himself that it might suggest), but then he had to go and get cocky, trying to work out your bluff, and that meant looking straight at you, blinding himself by staring directly at the Sun.
For a moment he was in real danger, much more so than when he was clinging to the door you just walked through to stop himself from pouncing on you and throwing you on his bed (well, you did say you hadn’t come to SLEEP in it), because somehow accidentally blurting out “I desperately want to fuck you,” feels far less scary than “God, I adore you.”
The long-term consequences would have been so much greater, too. The horniness he could probably explain away with this bad day he’s having (WAS having, before you turned up with coffee and sugar and smiles), adoration would be harder to talk his way out of.
There’s no way it wouldn’t have fallen out of him in a way that made it impossible to pull back in, the obvious truth of it written all over him for you to see and hear and know forever.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t relieved that neither of those things happened, it just means that he’s readjusting the order of items on his list of Things Not to Say or Do Around You.
It’s a list that keeps growing, mainly because he keeps saying and doing things around you, and after successful (success being defined as ‘not a failure’) experiences like tonight, Spencer can’t help thinking that since it all turned out fine, there’s absolutely no reason the two of you can’t do this again.
Because what could possibly go wrong?