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The first time Spencer asks Elle to cut his hair, neither of them thinks very much of it.
At least, that is what Spencer tells himself afterward.
His usual barber had retired a few weeks earlier and although replacing a barber should have been a relatively uncomplicated task, Spencer found himself avoiding it with increasing determination. Every time he considered making an appointment somewhere else, he would inevitably start thinking about the unfamiliarity of it all: a stranger standing behind him, hands in his hair, making conversation he would be expected to participate in. It wasn’t a fear exactly. It was simply exhausting. The mental effort required to adjust to something new often felt disproportionate to the thing itself and by the end of a workday he rarely had enough patience left over to spend it on a haircut.
So when Elle casually pointed out that his hair was getting longer than usual, the suggestion slipped out before he could examine it too closely.
“Why don’t you cut it?”
He’d meant it as a practical solution. At least, that was the explanation he settled on later.
The fact that he spent the next three days thinking about her coming over was, presumably, unrelated.
When she arrived at his apartment that Saturday afternoon, she laughed immediately upon seeing the setup he’d prepared. The chair positioned in the middle of the living room, the towel folded over the back, the scissors arranged neatly on the coffee table all gave the impression that he was preparing for a medical procedure rather than a haircut.
“You know,” she said, dropping her bag beside the couch, “most people would just go to a barber.”
Spencer pretended to consider this.
“That does sound like something most people would do.”
The laugh she gave him then was warm and easy, the kind that always seemed to settle naturally into the quiet spaces around him. He’d never quite understood how she managed that. Most people filled silence because they were uncomfortable with it. Elle seemed perfectly content to let it exist. She simply occupied it with him.
At the time, Spencer thought the most memorable part of the afternoon would be the haircut itself. Instead, what lingered afterward was something so insignificant that he felt vaguely ridiculous every time he remembered it.
Near the end, after she’d spent twenty minutes trimming and reshaping curls she’d repeatedly informed him were impossible to work with, she’d stepped around the chair to examine the result from the front. A lock of hair had fallen forward while he was moving and without interrupting her train of thought she reached out, brushed it away from his forehead and tucked it behind his ear before continuing whatever she’d been saying.
The gesture couldn’t have lasted more than a second.
She probably forgot about it immediately.
Spencer, unfortunately, did not.
\\
A week later he found himself recalling the feeling while standing in line for coffee. Two weeks later he remembered it while reading before bed. By the third week he was becoming increasingly annoyed by the frequency with which his brain seemed determined to revisit the memory.
The most irritating part was that he understood exactly why it remained lodged there.
Physical affection had never come easily to him. Even after years with the team, there were days when an unexpected touch could leave him momentarily tense before he had time to consciously relax. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t about trust. His brain simply processed things differently.
Except somehow that rule never seemed to apply to Elle.
Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped noticing her proximity as something unusual. He’d stopped keeping track of how often she leaned over his shoulder while reading reports, or how casually she bumped against him in crowded elevators, or how naturally she reached for his arm whenever she wanted his attention. The awareness was still there but it lacked the discomfort that normally accompanied it.
The realization should probably have concerned him.
Instead, he found himself looking forward to it.
Which was how, less than four weeks after the first haircut, he ended up calling her again.
His hair wasn’t actually long enough to justify another appointment. Spencer knew this. Even as he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, attempting to identify a problem substantial enough to warrant concern, he was fully aware that he was searching for an excuse rather than a reason.
The uncomfortable truth was that he missed her.
Not in any dramatic sense. Not with the desperate ache people wrote songs about. He simply found that his apartment felt different after she’d been there. Quieter. Larger. As though some invisible warmth disappeared along with her.
The haircut had given him a reason to ask her over without examining too closely why he wanted her there in the first place.
That should have been the moment he stopped.
Instead, it became a habit.
Months later, Spencer would realize that his hair had never once managed to grow as long as it had been before that first appointment. The intervals between haircuts grew increasingly absurd and every single time he convinced himself he was being subtle.
Every single time Elle showed up anyway.
She never mentioned it at first. She would arrive, shake her head at whatever flimsy excuse he’d invented that week and begin cutting his hair while telling him about her day. Afterwards they would sit in the living room for an hour or two, drinking coffee and talking about nothing important. Sometimes she stayed long enough for dinner. Sometimes she didn’t.
The haircut gradually became the least significant part of the ritual.
If Spencer was honest with himself, his favorite moments were always the ones afterward, when there was no longer any practical reason for her to remain and yet she continued sitting on his couch as though leaving had never crossed her mind.
The realization that he had started structuring entire weeks around those visits arrived slowly enough that he almost missed it.
Almost.
\\
Then one evening Elle walked into his apartment, she barely had time to set her bag down before her gaze landed on him and a laugh escaped her. The sound caught him completely off guard, not because she rarely laughed around him but because there was something almost disbelieving about it, as though she had just stumbled across evidence confirming a theory she’d been entertaining for weeks. Spencer immediately felt suspicious.
“What?”
Elle shook her head, still smiling. “Nothing.”
“It clearly isn’t nothing.”
The amusement in her expression only deepened. For several seconds she simply looked at him, her eyes flickering briefly toward his hair before returning to his face and Spencer found himself resisting the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that he was missing something obvious. Eventually she let out a small sigh and crossed her arms.
“Your hair looks fine.”
Spencer frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means you didn’t need a haircut.”
The realization arrived with enough force that he almost physically recoiled from it. Not because the accusation itself was particularly severe but because of the calm certainty with which she delivered it. There was no hesitation in her voice, no sense that she was guessing or teasing him for the sake of getting a reaction. Elle sounded like someone stating a fact she had known for quite some time and the expression she wore made it painfully clear that she was no longer talking about his hair.
He glanced away first.
It was a mistake. The moment he did, her smile softened.
“Spencer.”
The gentle warning in her voice only made the heat creeping up the back of his neck worse. He knew exactly where this conversation was heading and more importantly, he knew she knew it too.
“Hair grows,” he said finally, because apparently that was the best defense his brain could provide under pressure.
The laugh she let out was quiet and affectionate rather than mocking, which somehow made it far more devastating. “You’re a profiler. Surely you can come up with a better lie than that.”
Something in his chest tightened.
Most people would have pushed. They would have demanded an explanation or forced him to say the thing neither of them had said aloud yet. Elle never worked that way. She simply stood there, giving him more patience than he probably deserved, allowing the silence to settle naturally between them while he struggled with words that had seemed significantly easier when they existed only in theory.
Then, in a gesture so familiar he almost didn’t notice it at first, she stepped closer and reached up to brush a curl away from his forehead. Her fingers slipped briefly through his hair before tucking the strand behind his ear and the casual intimacy of it struck him with the same force it always did. Months had passed since the first time she’d done that and somehow his brain still reacted as though it were a completely new phenomenon.
When her hand dropped, she didn’t move away.
Neither did he.
The apartment felt unusually quiet, though not in an uncomfortable way. It felt like the moments immediately before a storm breaks, not tense so much as inevitable. Spencer found himself looking at her and realizing, with a clarity that was almost embarrassing, that the haircuts had never really fooled either of them. Every flimsy excuse, every increasingly absurd request, every unnecessary trim had been built around a truth he hadn’t wanted to examine too closely.
He liked having her here.
Not because she cut his hair.
Not because she filled empty afternoons.
Not even because she made his apartment feel warmer, though she did.
He simply liked her. Enough that he had spent months inventing reasons to see her instead of risking the possibility that she might not want the same things he did.
Something must have shown on his face because Elle’s expression softened further.
“You know,” she said quietly, “you could’ve just asked.”
For a moment Spencer could only stare at her. Then, despite himself, a small laugh escaped him. It was impossible to miss the gentle exasperation in her voice but there was something else underneath it too, something warm enough to loosen the knot that had been sitting in his chest for months.
“That would’ve required a level of emotional competence that I don’t consistently possess.”
The smile that followed was immediate.
And because she was still standing there, because she hadn’t left, because she was looking at him as though she had been waiting for him to catch up all this time, Spencer found himself wondering whether she had known from the very beginning that the haircuts were never the point.