Work Text:
“Hey, where’s your little bestie, Pretty boy?” Morgan asks, addresses the question to the bullpen in general, not Spencer specifically, which is why he and Prentiss end up answering at the same time.
“Hawai’i.” Spencer is deliberately vague, no need to let anyone know he has your exact location, right down to the resort you’re staying at. (You mentioned it in passing, he googled it when no-one was around. He doesn’t know your specific room, but he has a pretty good idea of what it’ll look like, how far it is for you to get to the beach, what the breakfast buffet looks like.)
“Wedding,” Emily says, her focus slightly different from his.
“Oh, right,” Morgan nods. “That was this weekend. Did she ever find a date for that?”
This is a question Spencer does NOT know the answer to, very deliberately did not ask you himself. Because being a man of knowledge doesn’t mean he wants to be a man of ALL knowledge, and imagining that you’re at a wedding with some funny, good-looking guy while being able to tell himself that it’s JUST his imagination is much better than KNOWING for sure that you are.
But clearly it’s something that has come up when he wasn’t around.
“No.” Prentiss replies when Reid doesn’t, and he tries and fails to miss the glance she throws him as she speaks, like this is information that’s significant to him in some way.
It is, sure, he can feel a small rock dissolving in his gut, but SHE’S not supposed to know that.
“Damn.” Morgan is all sympathy that’s barely concealing his amusement. “At a wedding with her ex, dateless. That’s either going to be a very good time or a very bad time.”
Spencer is suddenly having a VERY bad time. You hadn’t said anything about this ex to him.
What you HAD done, four weeks ago, was tell him you didn’t want to go to this wedding alone, then later made a joke about inventing a case on Maui that he’d need to do an in-person consult for.
It was all done so casually, thrown into a conversation you were already having, and at the time he hadn’t made any connection between these two, apparently unrelated, statements, but now he’s feeling pretty damn stupid.
Were you asking HIM to go to this wedding with you and pretend to be your date?
“I guess it depends on the ex,” Prentiss agrees.
They both turn to look at Spencer. “What do you think?”
“I… don’t know,” he admits, hoping they’ll move on quickly when he has nothing new to offer. “She never told me anything about an ex.”
“Huh,” Prentiss says, like that’s the most interesting thing she’s heard all day. (It probably is, to be fair. It’s barely 9.30 and it’s a paperwork day. ‘Interesting’ is not on the agenda.)
“Any ex ever, or this specific one?” Morgan digs his heel in.
“This specific one?” Spencer pulls the most disinterested face he can manage, like it is beyond him why anyone would want to discuss this topic at all. “I don’t know, does it matter?”
Morgan smiles, this shit-eating grin that makes it clear to Spencer he got away with exactly nothing right there. “I guess it doesn’t.” Then he stands up. “I’m gonna go see if Garcia has any intel on this ex that Reid knows nothing about.”
Prentiss watches him leave and then turns to Spencer. “She does. She totally looked him up.”
Spencer turns back to his paperwork, replying by just raising his eyebrows, sucking in his lips to make it clear he’s not going to say anything.
“So you don’t wanna know?”
“I really, really don’t,” he insists. Lying through his teeth, obviously.
When Morgan comes back five minutes later, Garcia is with him, practically vibrating with excitement.
“Did you hear from her?” she asks before she’s even by their cluster of desks.
Spencer looks up just long enough to decide she’s talking to Prentiss and goes back to pretending to type up case notes.
“No, just a text to say she landed.”
“Well, I got an email, there were pictures. The place is GORGEOUS. Also, happy to report she did bring BOTH bikinis.”
Spencer misspells evidence. Twice.
“Good.”
Is it good, Spencer wonders. Really?
“Any news on Ryan?” Prentiss, super casual.
Ryan is, Spencer presumes, the ex.
“No,” Garcia settles on the edge of his desk, clearly planning to be here for a while. “She didn’t mention him. Maybe he hasn’t arrived yet.”
Maybe he’s not going at all. Fell off a ladder and broke both legs. Spencer pictures the scene, the faceless shape of a man writhing in pain on the grass, then finding himself in casts up to his knees on both legs. What a shame. No beaches and bikinis for Ryan.
“No, he’s there already. She told me yesterday before she left that he had texted her.” Prentiss bursts Spencer’s bubble without a second glance at him.
It’s cruel but absolutely warranted. What an insane fantasy to entertain, maybe Spencer needs a vacation, some time away from all this crime and violence? Not to Maui, obviously, but maybe he could go to New York or something.
“And do we know what he wanted?” Garcia sounds nearly as interested as Spencer is pretending not to be.
“Oh, you know,” Prentiss shrugs like it’s all just silly. “The usual pre-wedding hookup chat. When is she arriving? Is she bringing someone? Does she have her own room? Real subtle stuff.”
Garcia claps her hands, gleefully scandalised. “Did she reply?”
“Yes,” Prentiss says and then doesn’t elaborate. When Spencer raises his head from his computer she is looking straight at him.
He turns his attention back to the screen immediately, quickly types some gibberish to make it seem like he was just searching for a word for his Very Important Report.
Garcia, who doesn’t go on the road with the team often, and isn’t in the bullpen enough to see, well, THINGS, has no idea what’s going on. “Well, what did she reply?” she demands.
“Just her flight number, I think.”
Ha! Spencer knows that, too, (might have been tracking the flight on the airline’s website) so at least he doesn’t have LESS information than Ryan does.
* * *
You wake up just before sunrise, your mind confused by the time difference, your body confused by everything else. The low hum of an air-con at a different frequency than what you’re used to, the mattress so soft it feels like cotton wool, the faint floral scent in the air.
Everything about this screams ‘not at home’, which by now automatically translates to ‘on a case’ in your mind, but you’re not. You’re supposed to be relaxing, sleeping in. Watching your cousin get married to your ex-boyfriend’s best friend tomorrow.
You blow out a gust of air and check your phone. Just to make sure you haven’t slept through a call from the team, who desperately need you back at work. No such luck.
Maybe you should text someone, just to make sure?
You’re distracted from this desperate plan by a knock on your door, quiet but insistent. You check your phone again, just to make sure of the time.
Maybe the team is HERE? There’s a case right here on the island and you can stay in your wonderful, comfortable room, but you’ll be too busy solving gritty crimes to actually do any of the wedding stuff? You imagine getting out of bed and finding Spencer on the other side of the door, casefile in his hand and his tie slightly crooked, telling you you’ve gotta go with him, it’s urgent.
What an unlikely fantasy, Spencer WANTING you to go anywhere with him.
There’s another knock, this time a pattern as familiar to you as the sound of your own heartbeat. You sigh and push your blankets off, cross the room quickly and open the door. You know from experience that this problem won’t go away if you ignore it.
“Morning.”
* * *
It’s mid-afternoon and Spencer is going stir crazy. He is getting through his paperwork faster than ever, Hotch is going to be so impressed, but his mind is racing and he’s mostly trying to distract himself from the temptation to google your hotel (again). When his phone pings he assumes it’s Prentiss, hiding from her own paperwork somewhere, but when he opens it the text is from you.
“Did you know there’s a plant that’s endemic to Maui which can live up to 90 years but only blossoms once?”
“It’s actually part of the sunflower family,” he replies, smiling to himself.
“It looks like something aliens left behind.” A few seconds go by. “In a good way.”
“So you’re not reading Dostoyevsky on the beach?” He caught you with a Russian for Beginners book on the jet a few weeks ago, practicing the cyrilic alphabet on a notepad, trying to work out how to write your own name.
“No. We went for a hike.”
We? Spencer chews on his bottom lip, trying to make up his mind, then types out quickly. “Nice. With Ryan?”
You don’t reply for a very long time and Spencer wishes there was a way to unsend a text. Is this something Garcia could do? And WOULD she do it without asking any questions?
Then, finally, when he’s nearly done composing a new message, changing the subject to the weather, a reply comes in. A photo that loads slowly on his small phone screen. It’s grainy and a little pixelated, but it’s clearly you, pulling an Edward Munch face at the camera next to another woman with your smile.
“Got kidnapped by my sister,” you send while he’s still looking at the picture.
“That’s a federal offense. She could be arrested.”
“She said to tell you you’re welcome to try.”
Right. So your sister knows about him. Well, she probably knows about all your colleagues, this doesn’t exactly make him special.
“You’re an FBI agent, just arrest her yourself.”
“Excuse me, I’m the victim here. Also: Forgot to pack my handcuffs.”
Two bikinis, no handcuffs, and Spencer is trying not to let his mind wander too far in either direction. Then he catches Morgan watching him as he's smiling at his phone and quickly turns off the display and drops the thing on his desk.
* * *
Spencer is rereading Fodor’s ‘Psychosemantics’; not because he doesn’t remember it or because there’s an argument in it he wants to revisit, but just for something to do.
It’s Friday night and he has a whole weekend of time he needs to fill, of distractions he needs to create for his mind. He hasn’t gotten off to the best start, and he knows that spending an evening with no company other than his own probably wasn’t the optimal choice, if what he wanted was a break from his own thoughts.
Because his thoughts definitely aren’t the kind of company he needs right now.
Work had dragged on for what felt like forever, the boredom of doing paperwork interrupted occasionally by snippets of conversations he didn’t really want to hear, but also listened to like his life depended on the information he might learn.
Ryan’s name scattered into every conversation, or at least that’s how it felt. Yours too, which was a lot more welcome, except when it was the both of you together. Prentiss and Garcia were going completely overboard with the speculation about what the two of you might be getting up to, all those hours to kill before the rehearsal dinner.
Spencer didn’t tell anyone when you texted him about hiking with your sister, just let them carry on, safe in the knowledge that they were wrong.
But then the hours went by, afternoon turned into evening and Spencer made it home where there is no-one speculating loudly everywhere he goes, but there is also no-one to stop HIM from speculating. And surely you’re back from your hike by now, but what are you doing?
It’s not as if his own guesses are any less graphic than Prentiss and Garcia’s as he feels himself starting to spiral.
Putting ‘Psychosemantics’ back on its shelf, Spencer makes himself think about the migratory patterns of the Arctic Tern, flying from one pole to the other and then back again every year, for five minutes, and then he allows himself to get out his phone and text you.
“Just checking if we need to get a search party organised or you’ve been released from your hike/kidnapping?”
You don’t reply for about 20 minutes, and Spencer is extremely very cool about that, until finally: “I have! And now I’m getting revenge by telling her about meteors in great detail while she’s trying to read a book.”
He smiles at that, then before he can come up with a witty reply, you send another text. “She wants me to explain what frictional heating is. Help.”
Spencer needs help too, his brain short-circuiting as he tries to fit you into the same sentence as the words friction and heat. Science used to be much simpler than this, he’s pretty sure. “Meteors don’t actually burn because of frictional heating. It’s something called ram pressure. The meteor compresses the air in front of it, the air heats up, and that heats up the meteor.” This isn’t any better. In fact, it might be worse.
“You know what,” you text back almost immediately. “I think I’ll just leave her to her Danielle Steel.”
So, clearly worse.
Except not for Spencer, on balance, because now he knows you’re on the beach with your sister, not in bed with Ryan. The fact that he’ll spend the rest of the evening thinking about friction while resisting the temptation to create any is a small price to pay for that. (Well, no friction and thinking about you, is the promise he makes to himself and then fails to honour.)
* * *
You’re back in your hotel room, supposed to be getting ready for dinner, but it’s proving trickier than you had anticipated. What are you meant to wear?
Also, your mind keeps drifting back to your text exchange with Spencer earlier today. Mainly the first one, you can’t really linger too long on the second, the eyebrow wiggling your sister had going on as you typed out ‘frictional heating’ and sent it without stopping to think for half a second about what you were saying. At least you know you can trust Spencer to stay on the science track and completely miss how suggestive that actually was. And you were wise enough to not tell your sister anything about ram pressure.
But: who told him about Ryan? You’re tempted to ask Emily, but it feels like that’d open a can of worms you don’t want to deal with. It’s not like you mind that he knows, it’s not a SECRET, but not telling Spencer about Ryan was a choice you made. Or at least you didn’t choose to tell him, when you easily could have.
You could have just said Ryan was the real reason you didn’t want to go to this stupid wedding. “My high school boyfriend is going to be there, he broke my heart when he left me for Liza Penwick senior year and I never really got over him, which means I have a hard time staying away from him, and he knows it so he always comes back when it suits him.”
You could have said THAT. You did to Emily, who is your friend, so why not say it to Spencer, who is also your friend?
You look at each of the three dresses you brought as your options for the rehearsal dinner. They all seemed like good ideas back home, but now? Not so much.
You’re either going to look like a nun or… whatever the opposite of that would be, in your mother’s words.
In the end you go with the purple dress. The back is too non-existent, the cleavage is too low, and there’s a slit that goes up way too high, but you like the way the soft fabric feels like a hug and you can never ever wear it back home. You bought it on a whim, just after getting the wedding invite, when you saw it in a shop window and it looked all familiar for some reason, like it was a dress you already owned, except of course you didn’t.
(Then three days later in a briefing you completely missed what JJ was saying about the commonalities between victims on your new case when you glanced at Spencer sitting next to you and realised that the reason your new dress had felt so familiar was because it was the exact same colour as your favourite of his cardigans, the one you once woke up to find draped over you on the jet when you fell asleep on your way back from a case in Oregon. It’s possible that’s why it’s your favourite more than the colour. If you’re being brutally honest with yourself, and you often find that that’s the only kind of honesty there is.)
* * *
It’s becoming clear to you that you must have done something absolutely terrible to your cousin when you were kids and then completely forgotten about it.
Because she must hate you. Why else would she seat you next to Ryan, winking cheerfully at the two of you as she sits down next to her soon-to-be husband?
There can be no other explanation for this than some revenge scheme you have failed to anticipate.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Ryan says, smiling in that too-confident way that you always found equal parts annoying and irresistible.
“Hi.” You try to pull up the front of your dress discreetly. You know it’s a losing battle, but you’re also very much aware it’s a battle you’re going to be fighting all night. This dress was a terrible choice. (It’s still so soft, though. Maybe you COULD wear it to things back home? Perhaps on a date, if you ever go on another one of those in your life.)
You send off a “Save me!” text, pretending you’re looking for something in your tiny little purse, and only realise when you get a reply that you accidentally sent the text to Spencer instead of your sister. Oops and a half.
The pinging sound your phone makes two minutes later is an excuse to dig it out of your purse. Because someone wants to reach YOU and it would be rude to ignore them. Right? After all, it could be work. “Have you been kidnapped again?”
You’re pretty sure he’s joking and not actually worried. “I wish. This rehearsal dinner is hell.” You don’t elaborate.
“I’d call in a bomb threat to the hotel, but the FBI has really good Tech Analysts, they’d probably be able to trace the call.”
“Federal offense?” You know it is, of course.
“Federal offense,” he confirms.
“You’re absolutely no help,” you complain.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine, I shall endure it. You go to bed.” You stare at the text you just sent. To your colleague. Is this inappropriate texting? Will you be made to do a workplace harassment seminar? Or can you argue that you’d send a text like that to any member of the team? You imagine texting Hotch that he should go to bed and it makes you giggle.
Your giggle makes Ryan look at you, which means his eyes are aimed straight at your face when Spencer’s reply arrives. “I’m already in bed.”
Your giggle turns into something you can’t really define. Trust Spencer to keep things factual, and trust your mind to go into complete meltdown at the fact that you’re having a casual text exchange with Spencer while he’s lying in his bed. That’s not something you do with a colleague (not even one you’ve been hounding to be your friend), it’s something you do with…
“Got a boyfriend?” Ryan pulls you out of your thoughts and you think he might’ve done you a favour.
“No.” You’re very firm on this, because you don’t. You have a COLLEAGUE. And then you immediately regret it, because Ryan thinking that you were in a relationship could have helped you get out of all sorts of difficulties. Still, pretending Spencer is your boyfriend seems wrong, and… Well, like it might be a problem all on its own.
(Except: Why would it have to be Spencer? If your boyfriend isn’t here anyway, he could be anyone. Ryan would never know. You could invent some random guy who’s really into playing piano and performing cunnilingus and pretend he was your boyfriend. Both are things Ryan has no interest in, so it’s not like he’d ask any follow-up questions.)
“Good to know,” Ryan says, smirking at you, but you don’t miss the way his eyes track your phone as you put it back in your purse, like maybe he’s not quite sure you’re telling the truth.
You wouldn’t even have had to say you had an actual boyfriend. You could have just said it was complicated, that feels like something close to being true.
* * *
On Saturday Spencer somehow manages to sleep until noon, wakes up from a dream so vivid that for a few moments he’s confused by the fact that you’re NOT in bed with him, listens for a full 5 seconds for any sounds coming from the en-suite before sanity catches up with him and he remembers that he’s alone and you’re… in Hawai’i.
He checks his phone but no texts have come through from you while he was sleeping, the most recent message in his inbox is the one where you told him to go to bed.
Clearly you took his “I’m already in bed” to mean that he wanted to sleep, not that he wasn’t doing anything and was free to distract you from whatever made the rehearsal dinner so terrible. (Maybe he needed the distraction himself, taking his mind off thoughts of you as he lay in bed by texting you, reminding himself what your relationship actually is.) Or maybe things turned around and you ended up having a great time.
This thought sends Spencer down a trail of just how great a time you might have been having and what part Ryan might have played in it and he finds himself both wanting to throw up and needing a cold shower simultaneously, which is honestly more stress than his body needs so soon after waking up.
He distracts himself - from both the nausea and the thoughts of you in bed, naked (with another man, who Spencer can’t quite pretend to be) - by trying to come up with a reason to text you that won’t feel like he’s monitoring you or intruding. He’s torn between requesting proof of life as a joke or just asking if the night got better. But he’s not sure the joke really works and he’s very sure he doesn’t necessarily want the answer to the question, so asking it probably isn’t a great idea.
In the end, he goes in a different direction entirely. “Fun fact: The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs is actually only the third largest to hit the Earth that we know about. The largest was almost twice the size and released 7 times the energy. The crater it left in South Africa is more than 185 miles wide.”
By this time it’s nearly 9AM where you are, and he assumes you’re already up and getting ready for the wedding. Tries not to wonder if you’re in the shower at this very moment. He really does need to get out of the habit (it’s not a habit, it’s an addiction, Spencer has been to enough meetings to know the difference, but not quite enough to actually do something about this particular issue) of thinking about you in this way. One day he’s going to snap and do something inappropriate while you’re actually around to witness it.
Ten minutes later you reply: “You’re right, that IS a very fun fact.”
Spencer is getting ready to elaborate, tell you how very long ago it was, all that died was algae and bacteria, but then another message arrives, prompting him to delete what he has written so far.
“Are you punishing me for eating breakfast in bed?”
“Yes,” he sends back.
“Brutal, but fair.”
Spencer smiles at that. “I hope everything goes well with the wedding.”
There’s a pause, and he almost thinks that you aren’t going to reply (you don’t have to, it’s not like it requires a response), but then his phone pings. “Thanks. Me too.”
He doesn’t text back after that. Not to ask about last night, not to elaborate on what he means by ‘well’ - and certainly not what he DOESN’T mean. Instead, he puts on a jacket and goes to the park to play chess, because he needs the distraction.
* * *
You’re not the type of person who cries at weddings. Sure, love is beautiful, great for them, whatever, but it just doesn’t bring the waterworks.
THIS wedding, however, might just drive you to tears. Mostly of boredom, though. The ceremony went ahead with absolutely no drama, even the flower girl performed her part to perfection. (which it’s difficult to be mad at a four-year-old for, but still. Couldn’t she have thrown a tantrum halfway up the aisle about getting sand in her sloes?) And now dinner is. Well, dinner. There’s food, which is nice, but at what cost?
Ryan, once again seated next to you, has spent the last hour and a half talking about himself. How he’s the only one at the car dealership where he works who can actually sell a car; how he made some adjustments to his workout routine and he’s really feeling the gains (this said so suggestively you couldn’t even pretend not to realise he meant you’d be seeing those gains later, too); he bought a new couch and even if he didn’t bring a photo of the walls in his house, he still managed to find one that matched the paintjob exactly.
It’s truly riveting stuff, and you wonder if he was always this boring.
You hope not, because what would that say about you?
A waitress comes to clear your dessert plates, and you smile gratefully at her. This woman, in her black dress pants and white shirt is a symbol of the end of this meal. Once she’s done, you can get up and leave the table and go mingle. Maybe you’ll mingle all the way back down to the beach. (But only if you can do it undetected.)
When he starts in on an anecdote about going to brunch with his parents the other week, you estimate that Ryan has now told you more about himself and his life TODAY, than Spencer has in all the time you’ve known him.
You’re pretty sure Spencer doesn’t have a workout routine, but you wonder idly what colour his couch is and whether it matches the colour of his walls. (Probably not, you assume his walls are covered in floor to ceiling bookcases.)
Would Spencer talking about himself be boring if he did it all the time? Are you only so completely interested in every little personal fact he shares because it happens so rarely? Probably not. He talks plenty about other things, and they aren’t boring. Out of left field sometimes? Sure. But something about how his brain is basically an entire school library (your favourite place in high school) just makes his mini lectures feel like a marshmallow hot chocolate on a rainy day.
You’re tempted to excuse yourself so you can go call him and ask what ACTUALLY happens when paint dries, like, chemically.
“What do you think?”
You realise Ryan is looking at you and clearly expecting an answer to some question he asked and you missed because you were… thinking about Spencer Reid. You look at Ryan more closely, trying to determine from his expression whether he’s expecting a yes or no. Then to determine if what he said is something you’d even want to agree with.
“Um. I don’t know,” you say. Which has the advantage of being the truth. The disadvantage is that you have no clue what it is you just told him you don’t know.
Ryan leans in, his breath warm and sickeningly sweet on your face. It must be the cocktails he’s been drinking with his food. You realise just in the nick of time that he doesn’t want to whisper something to you, he’s going to kiss you, and you pull back as far as the chair and your neck will allow, which - luckily - is far enough.
“Did you know that there are almost 30,000 recognised species of wild orchids and over 100,000 registered hybrids? In fact, orchids make up more than 6% of all seed plants. On the PLANET. Isn’t that wild? I kill an orchid just about every month.”
Ryan stares at you like he’s not quite sure what you’re talking about, when really it should be obvious. Plants. You’re talking about plants. Orchids, specifically.
“You know what, I don’t think working at the FBI is good for you. You’ve gotten really weird.” Ryan shakes his head at you like you’ve disappointed him in some way.
“Thanks,” you say, smiling brightly as he gets up and walks away. Which saves you the trouble, so maybe you can’t say he never did anything nice for you.
“What was that?” Your sister turns up so quickly you know she must have been waiting to swoop in.
“I learned a magic trick,” you tell her. “I made Ryan disappear.”
“I saw that. Neat.” She smiles, all big sister smug. “Did you learn that at the eff-bee-ih?” (She always says it like that, like it’s just a game and you’re pretending to chase criminals for a living. Like your job isn’t actually dangerous.)
You know perfectly well what she’s insinuating. But still. “I did, actually.”
“Spencer is the one who does magic, right?”
“What are you saying?” The way she says his name, you know exactly what she’s saying.
“I’m not saying anything,” she insists, hands up. “I would never. It’s just a very cool trick you can suddenly do.” (It IS a pretty cool trick.)
“He mostly does card tricks, I think,” you say after a beat. “I don’t think he actually makes people disappear. I mean, that would be problematic for all sorts of reasons in our line of work.”
Your sister pinches the bridge of her nose, looking so much like your mother that it makes you laugh. “That job has absolutely wrecked your sense of humour.”
“It has,” you agree, because it’s true. You’re laughing at a lot of things lately that wouldn’t have been funny to you a year ago. “It’s been good, too, though.”
You both turn your heads to watch as Ryan hits on a waitress. “Yeah, it really has,” she agrees.
* * *
Back in your hotel room you dig out your phone and text Spencer. “Have you ever sawed someone in half?”
It’s nearly 6AM in D.C. and it’s a Sunday, you aren’t expecting an answer, but you get one almost immediately. “Pretty sure that would ALSO be a federal offense.”
You smile at that and go brush your teeth.
* * *
Spencer waits a few minutes to see if you text him back, trying not to read anything into the fact that it’s after midnight where you are - at a wedding with your ex - but you’re texting HIM. The list of things Spencer has spent a fretful night imagining that you might be doing is a lot shorter now than it was a few minutes ago, and although he knows he doesn’t really have the right to have an opinion on what you get up to, at weddings or with exes or whatever, he can’t help the way it lifts his mood.
When no texts come through, he sets down his phone on the nightstand and falls asleep almost immediately, the tension gone from his body.
* * *
Sunday morning your sleep is interrupted way too early by the ringing of your phone. You’re still half-dreaming when you answer “Hey,” your voice low and just a little bit raspy.
“How much did you have to drink last night?”
“Um.” Hotch’s direct tone startles you the rest of the way awake. For some reason you expected it to be Spencer, calling to tell you something new he just learned about why puppies are that cute. “Not a lot.” (The absolute best thing about suddenly and unexpectedly being completely over Ryan is that there was no need for you to get drunk enough to forget what regrets are.)
“Good. A case came up in LA, I need you to meet us there. There’s a ticket waiting for you at Kahului Airport, your flight is in 3 hours.”
You’re already out of bed, surveying your room and mentally planning your departure; packing (don’t forget the dresses you hung in the wardrobe), letting your family know you’re going (maybe limit that to texting your sister, because you’re just a little bit of a coward sometimes), ordering a taxi. “Okay.”
“Sorry,” Hotch says, like he just realised he should have maybe opened with an apology for calling you on your long weekend off and demanding that you cut your vacation short to come back to work.
“Don’t be.” You have never meant anything you said to him more, since you told him you wanted the job. “I didn’t exactly pack for work, though.” (As much as you’ve decided you’re in love with your soft, purple dress, interviewing a witness while wearing it probably won’t fly.)
“Prentiss says she has a key to your apartment. Do you have a go bag ready?”
“Yeah, it’s in my bedroom. My badge is in the drawer in the hallway.” You dig a pair of jeans and a t-shirt out of your suitcase, it’s the only things you packed that don’t scream ‘vacation’ or ‘wedding’, so they’ll just have to do.
“Good. See you in California.” He hangs up before you can reply.
You’re showered, packed, and dressed in 45 minutes, and 5 minutes after that you’re hugging your sister goodbye in reception before you jump into the waiting taxi and make the escape you’ve been dreaming of since friday.
When you land in LAX, Spencer is waiting for you at Arrivals with instructions from Hotch about the relatives the two of you need to go interview and a smile on his face, and it’s a very close call but you manage not to blurt out “I missed you.”