⊹ ࣪ ˖ Your Kiss, My Cheek ─ Spencer Reid.
Amid lingering steam, unspoken feelings, and the impossible reality of sharing a home with your ex-husband again, two familiar faces arrive for dinner.
୨ৎ ──── second chance romance. 8,6k. ex wife & prosecutor!reader. mentions of mental illness. angst and yearning. english isn't my first language. next chapter. series mastelist. main masterlist.
It was ridiculous, really.
You had to remain beneath the shower long after there was any reason to. Long after the shampoo had disappeared down the drain and the soap had been washed from your skin. The water had long since turned cold, yet you never reached for the faucet. Instead, you stood there motionless beneath the relentless stream, arms wrapped tightly around yourself as icy water cascaded over your shoulders, your spine and your chest. You just welcomed the discomfort because it was easier to endure the ache of freezing water than the unbearable warmth that had settled beneath your ribs the instant your hands had touched Spencer again.
It had been so innocent.
He was injured, still izzy from the concussion and barely able to stand without swaying. You had simply done what anyone would have done, guided him carefully beneath the spray, steadied him when his knees threatened to buckle and helped him wash around the bandages the doctors had warned you to keep dry.
And yet your body had betrayed you with humiliating ease the moment your fingertips settled against the broad slope of his shoulder.
All because showers had never simply been showers with him.
They had been stolen mornings before work, when one of you inevitably wandered into the bathroom after the other with the flimsiest excuse imaginable. They had been quiet reunions after cases, when he returned home exhausted enough to barely keep his eyes open, yet somehow still found the strength to pull you beneath the water with him because seeing you was the only thing that truly convinced him he was safe. They had been conversations, laughter echoing off tiled walls, shampoo bottles exchanged absentmindedly between sleepy hands, arguments about whose turn it was to buy more soap dissolving into kisses.
Oh...the kisses.
You could remember every single one with a clarity so sharp it almost hurt.
Because Spencer had never kissed you carelessly. Every kiss carried the intensity of someone determined to commit a moment to memory before it disappeared forever. He always approached you slowly, giving you every opportunity to pull away, though neither of you ever did. His hands inevitably found your face first, cupping it with such impossible gentleness that it often left you wondering whether he truly understood how loved he made you feel with such simple gestures. His thumbs would brush absentmindedly over your cheeks while he looked at you for one lingering heartbeat too long, studying your expression as though there were something endlessly fascinating hidden inside it.
Then one hand would drift upward, disappearing into your damp hair while his fingers settled at the nape of your neck, slipping effortlessly between wet strands until his palm rested against your skin. He would tilt your head ever so slightly before his mouth found yours again, deepening the kiss. Outside the shower, the world continued to exist—cases, paperwork, deadlines, violence, grief—but inside those four tiled walls it all ceased to matter. There was only the rhythmic percussion of water striking porcelain, the damp curl of his hair brushing your forehead, and the slow rhythm of two hearts beating close enough that you sometimes couldn’t tell which belonged to whom.
Now, you could almost feel his hands finding your waist again. You could almost hear the quiet hum he always made whenever he was content, vibrating softly against your lips whenever he smiled into a kiss. It felt so vivid that your body leaned into the illusion before your mind could stop it.
Your eyes opened.
Oh.
The shower was empty.
There was no Spencer standing in front of you, no shy smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, no hazel eyes looking at you as though you were still the safest place he had ever known. There was only cold porcelain beneath your feet, pale steam clinging stubbornly to the glass, and the deafening absence of the man your body still remembered with humiliating precision.
Your arms wrapped instinctively around yourself, holding your own elbows so tightly your fingertips blanched white. You weren’t entirely sure whether you were trying to warm your chilled skin or keep your heart from splintering all over again.
Then your phone began to vibrate.
The insistent buzz shattered the stillness with startling violence, echoing across the marble countertop and pulling you so abruptly out of the past that you physically flinched. Your pulse leapt into your throat as you blinked through the curtain of water still clinging to your eyelashes. Through the fogged bathroom, the screen glowed brightly against the counter.
Penelope.
Your hand reached the faucet before your brain fully caught up. The rushing water disappeared instantly, leaving behind a heavy silence interrupted only by the rhythmic drip…drip…drip from the showerhead. You snatched the nearest towel, wrapping it hurriedly around yourself before crossing the room in damp footsteps and grabbing your phone almost before it had finished vibrating.
“Penelope?”
“There you are!” Garcia’s voice burst through the speaker with its usual sunshine, though underneath it lingered the unmistakable exhaustion that had settled over everyone since Spencer had been shot. “I was beginning to think you’d fallen asleep.”
You frowned, absently rubbing the towel over your damp hair as cold droplets slid lazily down the back of your neck.
“…What?”
A brief pause followed.
“What do you mean what?” Penelope laughed, genuine amusement bubbling through the phone. “Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten.”
Your brow knitted together.
Forgotten…what?
Then, almost audibly, the pieces clicked together.
Dinner.
“Oh my God,” you breathed, squeezing your eyes shut in disbelief. “I did forget.”
“I knew it!” Penelope exclaimed triumphantly. “Morgan insisted you’d remember because you’re terrifyingly organized, but I told him trauma beats planners every single time.”
Despite yourself, a tired laugh escaped your lips. You pinched the bridge of your nose, still feeling the lingering ache behind your eyes.
“What time is it?”
“A little after six.
Six.
You had spent nearly forty minutes standing beneath freezing water trying to convince yourself your heart hadn’t just betrayed you.
“We’re only about ten minutes away,” Penelope continued brightly. “Morgan stopped to grab dinner because he refuses to believe either of you has actual food in that kitchen after…” She hesitated delicately before finishing more softly. “…everything.”
A helpless laugh escaped you.
“He’s probably right.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she laughed. “He’s absolutely right.”
Your gaze shifted toward the bathroom door. Beyond it, the house had settled back into its quiet rhythm. Somewhere down the hallway Spencer was exactly where you had left him. Maybe asleep beneath the comforter. Maybe stubbornly reading every line of his discharge packet despite strict instructions to rest. You could practically picture him with his glasses perched low on his nose, mentally cataloguing recovery statistics instead of allowing himself to simply exist for five uninterrupted minutes.
“I’ll be ready,” you promised.
“You don’t have to impress us,” Penelope replied, her voice gentler now. “We’re coming to see Reid…and maybe confirm neither of you has accidentally burned the house down.”
A genuine laugh slipped free this time.
“I think we can manage that.”
“Mmm.” You could almost hear her grin through the phone. “I’ll reserve judgment until I see the kitchen.”
The call ended with another round of affectionate teasing.
You lowered the phone slowly, your hand lingering around it for a moment as silence reclaimed the bathroom. The mirror in front of you had fogged over completely now, softening your reflection into blurred outlines and muted colors. Even so, you could still make out the evidence the shower had failed to erase. Your cheeks remained flushed despite the freezing water, loose strands of damp hair clung stubbornly to your temples and neck...but no amount of cold water had managed to wash away the memories that lingered beneath your skin.
With a slow sigh, you tightened the towel around yourself before reaching automatically for clean clothes. Familiar motions steadied your hands where your thoughts could not: soft sweater, comfortable jeans and dry socks. The ordinary ritual of getting dressed became something to focus on, each small task another step away from the woman standing beneath the shower only moments ago, remembering kisses she had no business remembering.
Ten minutes.
You should probably warn Spencer.
The thought arrived with enough practicality to interrupt the dangerous direction your mind had been drifting: dinner, just Derek and Penelope, familiar faces and voices. Normality, however temporary, you welcomed the distraction. Taking one final breath, you smoothed invisible wrinkles from the front of your sweater, more out of habit than necessity, before quietly stepping into the hallway.
The bedroom door stood slightly ajar.
You paused outside, lifting your hand to knock softly against the wood despite knowing he would almost certainly tell you to come in anyway.
“Spencer?”
No answer.
“…I’m coming in.”
You pushed the door open carefully.
Spencer was standing beside the bed.
Or, more accurately, trying to.
One hand remained firmly planted against the mattress to steady himself while the other was hopelessly trapped somewhere inside the sleeve of a pale blue button-down that had twisted itself halfway up his injured arm. His hospital sweatpants rested low against his hips, the loose waistband sitting carefully above the thick bandage wrapped around his upper thigh, while the rest of the shirt hung completely open, exposing the pale expanse of his chest and abdomen. And fresh bruises painted themselves across his ribs in uneven shades of violet and yellow, and every few seconds he paused, blinking faintly as though his brain needed another moment to remember how sleeves were supposed to work.
It was strangely endearing.
He looked up the instant he heard the door.
“Oh.”
There wasn’t a trace of embarrassment on his face, only relief.
“I appear to have encountered…” His gaze dropped thoughtfully to the offending sleeve. “…a surprisingly complicated engineering problem.”
The corner of your mouth betrayed you before you could stop it.
“You got stuck putting on a shirt.”
“I did.”
His agreement was so completely sincere, that any teasing remark died before it reached your lips.
“The statistical probability of this occurring under normal neurological conditions,” he continued gravely, giving the twisted sleeve another experimental tug that accomplished absolutely nothing, “is relatively low.”
“But you’re not under normal neurological conditions.”
“No.”
He sighed softly.
“I’m also making a conscious effort not to elevate my right arm beyond approximately forty-five degrees because you specifically instructed me not to.”
Your smile threatened to become an actual laugh.
“I did, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
For a moment neither of you spoke.
The room settled into a gentle silence broken only by the quiet rustle of fabric and Spencer’s careful breathing. Without the distraction of conversation, your eyes finally lingered on him properly.
His curls were still damp from the shower, darker than usual where they curled untidily against his forehead and temples. Tiny droplets continued their slow journey down the graceful line of his neck, slipping across his collarbone before disappearing beneath the waistband of his sweatpants. You noticed the faint tension around his mouth every time he shifted his weight, the careful way he unconsciously favored one side.
He looked so tired that your chest tightened painfully.
“May I…” Spencer hesitated and his fingers loosening around the stubborn fabric before he lifted his eyes to yours. “…ask for assistance?”
You didn’t answer with words and simply crossed the room before he had the chance to regret asking.
“Turn around.”
He obeyed immediately.
The mattress shifted softly as he pivoted, careful of his balance, until his back was facing you. Standing this close to him again felt profoundly unfair, close enough to catch the clean scent of his shampoo mingling with the sterile trace of antiseptic ointment lingering around the bandage on his upper arm. If you leaned forward the smallest fraction, your forehead would rest naturally between his shoulder blades, exactly where it had countless times before.
You refused to let yourself think about that.
Instead, you focused on the shirt tangled stubbornly around his arm.
“Relax your shoulder,” you murmured, already gathering the twisted fabric between your fingers.
“I’m trying.”
Very carefully, you eased the sleeve down over the thick white bandage, lifting the fabric millimeter by millimeter so it wouldn’t catch against the gauze. Your fingertips barely grazed his skin, more conscious of where you weren’t touching than where you were. Every adjustment required you to stay close enough to feel the slow rise and fall of his breathing beneath your hands.
Spencer remained perfectly still, just as he always had.
It had always been like this with you. Whether you were standing in front of him before an FBI banquet, frowning in concentration as you straightened the knot of his tie because he insisted yours somehow always looked better, brushing away invisible flecks of lint from the shoulders of his jacket before a case, or sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with one of his favorite cardigans pooled across your lap while you patiently stitched together the sleeve he’d torn climbing a fence after a foot pursuit, Spencer had never once flinched beneath your hands.
Now, once his injured arm was finally eased through the sleeve, the rest came naturally. You guided his other hand into the fabric with care before lifting the shirt over his shoulders, settling it carefully against his back. The cotton fell into place with only a few stubborn wrinkles remaining, and almost without thinking, your palms smoothed over them in slow strokes, flattening the fabric the same way you had done hundreds of times before.
“There,” you murmured softly.
Spencer turned to face you, allowing you to finish what you had started. The shirt still hung open, revealing the pale skin beneath and the fresh bandage wrapped around his shoulder. Your fingers found the first button automatically. Then the second. Then the third. One by one, you worked your way upward with precision, each button sliding through its place beneath fingertips that remembered the task far better than your mind wanted to admit.
By the time you reached the last button, there was nothing left to fix.
The shirt sat perfectly against his chest. Every crease had been smoothed away. Every edge lay exactly where it belonged.
You should have stepped back.
Instead, your hands remained there.
Your fingertips rested lightly against the soft cotton over his heart, feeling the steady rhythm beneath it. Perhaps it was truly his heartbeat...or it was only your own pulse echoing loudly enough to convince you it belonged to him. You couldn’t tell anymore.
Only then did you realize how close you had drifted.
Close enough to count the impossibly long lashes resting against his cheeks. Close enough to notice the tiny scar tucked beneath his jaw, the one you’d kissed absentmindedly so many times throughout your marriage that you’d eventually stopped seeing it altogether. Close enough to catch the faint scent of cedar soap lingering in his damp curls, fresh from the shower.
A loose curl had fallen across his forehead and before you could think better of it, your hand lifted entirely on instinct.
You brushed it back with a tenderness so deeply ingrained it no longer felt like a conscious decision. Your fingers slipped gently through the still-damp curls before settling for the briefest moment against the side of his face, your thumb barely grazing his cheekbone and his eyes closed.
When Spencer finally opened his eyes again, they didn’t wander. They found yours immediately, searching your face with a softness that felt almost vulnerable, as though he were looking for evidence that this wasn’t another concussion-induced dream. Neither of you spoke. Neither of you seemed capable of it. So the silence stretched between you, delicate enough that even breathing felt like it might disturb it.
Then, so carefully it felt more like a question than a movement, Spencer lowered his forehead until it rested lightly against yours.
You didn’t pull away and your noses brushed, featherlight, and for one suspended moment the rest of the world simply ceased to exist. His breathing mingled with yours in slow rhythms, his eyelashes rested against his cheeks once more, eyes closed as though he couldn’t bear to look at you and risk discovering you’d disappeared and the distance between your mouths dwindled until there was almost nothing left of it, only the smallest sliver of trembling air separating two people who had once known each other so completely that kisses had never required thought.
“You…” Spencer whispered, your name caught somewhere behind the single broken word, his voice little more than a breath that ghosted across your lips.
One of his hands lifted hesitantly, slowly enough that you could see him thinking through every inch of the movement. It trembled hovering beside your waist without quite daring to touch you. His fingers curled faintly in empty air, stopping just short of your sweater, waiting for a permission neither of you knew how to ask for.
Oh.
And then the doorbell rang.
The sharp sound cracked through the silence with almost violent force, followed immediately by the unmistakable boom of Morgan’s voice from the front porch.
“Pretty boy! If you’re unconscious again, I’m kicking this door down!”
The moment shattered so completely it almost hurt.
You stepped back too quickly, your hand slipping from Spencer’s cheek as though waking from a dream. His own hand dropped immediately to his side before it had ever reached you, fingers curling into his palm instead. And for a heartbeat neither of you moved, you simply stared at one another, both trying to remember how to exist inside a room that suddenly felt ordinary again.
“I…” You cleared your throat, though it did nothing to steady your voice. “They’re here for dinner.”
Spencer blinked once, twice, as though the sentence had to travel a much greater distance than it should before making sense.
“…Right.”
Another impatient knock rattled the front door.
“Derek Morgan,” Penelope called over his shoulder, “stop traumatizing the recovering patient!”
A small breath escaped you, somewhere between relief and disappointment, because the interruption had arrived at exactly the wrong moment…or perhaps exactly the right one. You weren’t sure anymore.
“I’ll let them in.”
You had almost reached the doorway when Spencer spoke again.
“Thank you.”
You looked back.
He wasn’t talking about the shirt.
But you simply offered a small nod before leaving the room, carrying the weight of another unspoken conversation with you as Morgan knocked dramatically for what was undoubtedly the third time.
***
The front door had barely swung halfway open before Penelope swept inside in a whirl of bright colors and floral perfume, two grocery bags hanging from her wrists and somehow still managing to gesture animatedly while she talked. Behind her came Morgan, nudging the door shut with his foot as he balanced enough takeout containers to feed an entire squad rather than the handful of people expected for dinner.
“There they are!” Penelope announced triumphantly, already smiling before she’d properly crossed the threshold.
Then she stopped.
“…Huh.”
You frowned before you could stop yourself.
“What?”
Penelope didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she continued studying the two of you with the exaggerated seriousness of someone examining evidence at a crime scene.
“You both look…” She narrowed her eyes dramatically. “…different.”
Morgan finally looked up from the stack of containers he’d been carefully preventing from collapsing, following Penelope’s line of sight. His gaze landed on Spencer first, then shifted to you, lingering just long enough for a slow grin to begin spreading across his face.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I was just about to say the exact same thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you replied a little too quickly.
“Uh-huh,” Morgan drawled.
Penelope abandoned the grocery bags on the entry table and wandered closer, circling the two of you with the kind of open curiosity that only she could somehow make seem affectionate rather than invasive. She hummed softly to herself as though mentally cataloguing every tiny inconsistency.
“Okay…” she murmured. “Let’s see…Spencer’s wearing a clean shirt.” Her finger lifted thoughtfully. “Which is impressive considering a few days ago he could barely lift one arm.” Another finger. “And…”
Her smile widened.
“Your hair’s wet.”
You instinctively reached for it and your fingertips found damp strands immediately.
“It hasn’t dried yet.”
“No,” Penelope agreed brightly. “It really hasn’t.”
Morgan’s attention shifted to Spencer, whose curls were still dark with moisture despite his best efforts to towel them dry. A tiny bead of water escaped one stubborn curl near his temple, tracing a slow path down the side of his neck before disappearing beneath the neatly buttoned collar of his shirt.
Morgan watched it happen and his grin became positively dangerous.
“And his hair’s still dripping.”
Spencer, entirely unaware of the significance of the observation, reached up absently to smooth the offending curl back into place.
Morgan’s eyes flicked between the two of you again.
“Were you two showering?”
Your heartbeat climbed into your throat.
“No,” you answered instantly.
“Well…” Spencer began at exactly the same time.
Both of you stopped.
Morgan’s eyebrows climbed so high they practically disappeared beneath his curls, while Penelope clapped both hands over her mouth in delighted horror.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, this just became significantly more interesting.”
“I helped him shower,” you corrected immediately, the words tumbling over one another with enough speed that even you knew it sounded suspicious. Folding your arms across your chest, you forced yourself to slow down. “His stitches weren’t supposed to get wet, and the doctor specifically said someone needed to supervise him because of the concussion—”
Morgan nodded solemnly through the entire explanation.
“Perfectly reasonable.”
Relief began settling into your chest.
Then—
“I just hope nothing happened that elevated his heart rate.”
Your head snapped toward him.
“Derek.”
“What?” he asked with flawless innocence, adjusting the stack of takeout containers in his arms. “I’m talking about the patient’s recovery.” He turned toward Spencer with exaggerated professionalism. “So…how was the assistance?”
Spencer blinked.
Then, with complete sincerity that only made everything worse, he answered, “It was very helpful.”
Morgan barked out a laugh.
Penelope made a sound somewhere between a squeal and a cackle before immediately rescuing you from the conversation, slipping her arm through yours and steering you toward the kitchen before you could formulate a rebuttal.
“Come on,” she declared, patting your arm with exaggerated sympathy. “Let’s leave the children unsupervised while we find plates.”
“I’m older than both of you,” Morgan called after her.
“Yes,” Penelope replied over her shoulder without missing a beat as she opened the first cabinet she came across. “And somehow you’ve made that everyone else’s problem.”
The two of you disappeared into the kitchen, cabinet doors opening and closing as Penelope accepted the stack of plates from your hands. The kitchen looked almost untouched by time, with the pale blue kettle still rested on the stove beneath the little shelf Spencer had insisted on building himself despite having absolutely no business handling power tools. Even the tiny chip in the corner of the butcher block remained exactly where it had always been after the two of you had accidentally dropped an entire cast-iron skillet during your first attempt at making homemade pasta. Most people would’ve looked at the room and simply seen a kitchen but Penelope saw six years of your life.
“It’s almost exactly the same,” she murmured, the observation slipping from her lips so quietly it barely sounded like a question.
You followed her gaze almost reluctantly. It wasn’t that you hadn’t noticed before. Time had moved forward everywhere else but inside these walls, it had simply…settled.
“I suppose it is.”
Penelope looked at you then, studying your face with the kind of gentle concern only someone who had known you for years could wear.
“I thought you would’ve sold it.”
A quiet laugh escaped through your nose, though there wasn’t much humor in it.
“So did everyone else.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
The answer came easily.
You reached into the drawer for the cutlery, carefully separating forks from knives more because your hands needed something to do than because the task required any concentration.
“I bought an apartment instead.”
Penelope blinked.
“I know that,” she said. “But why keep both?”
Your hands slowed.
“It’s closer to work,” you answered first, almost automatically. “The apartment makes more sense. It’s twenty minutes from the courthouse instead of almost an hour. I practically live there now. But this place…” You said and glanced around the room again. “I couldn’t sell it.”
Penelope waited.
“It wasn’t because of Spencer.” Your fingertips rested against the edge of the counter, tracing absent circles across the wood worn smooth by years of dinners, paperwork, birthday cakes, late-night coffee and ordinary conversations. “I mean, my life happened here, so much of who I became happened inside this house.”
Your eyes wandered toward the dining room.
“I passed the bar while living here, and I painted that wall three different colors before deciding I liked the first one after all.” You shook your head softly. “I planted those herbs because I thought keeping basil alive couldn’t possibly be that difficult.”
Penelope smiled.
“I loved my husband and being married.” You added and your fingers curled against the countertop. “I’m not going to erase six years of my life because they ended badly.”
Penelope reached out instinctively, but you shook your head before she could touch your hand.
“Honey...”
“No.” You stopped her and smiled sadly before she could say anything else. “I know where this conversation is going.”
“Do you?”
“You think this…” You gestured vaguely toward the living room where Spencer and Morgan’s voices drifted faintly through the wall. “…means something.”
“I think,” Penelope corrected softly, “that he still looks at you like you’re the first beautiful thing he’s ever seen.”
You looked away.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to him.”
“It didn’t matter enough.” You inhaled slowly. “He left.” Your voice remained calm, almost frighteningly so. “He looked me in the eye, signed divorce papers, and walked away.”
Your gaze settled on the wedding photograph that no longer sat on the sideboard because you’d packed it away months ago.
“I begged him to stay.”
Penelope closed her eyes briefly.
“I remember.”
“And he still left.”
You shook your head.
“So whatever he felt…” Your voice caught for the first time. “…it wasn’t enough.”
Penelope stepped closer. “He loves you.”
You laughed softly.
“If that’s what love looks like…” Your eyes stung. “I don’t think I want it anymore.”
The words hung between you, heavy and terrible.
After a long silence, you forced yourself to straighten the stack of plates, needing the distraction.
“I’m taking care of him because he’s hurt.”
Penelope didn’t answer.
“He’ll recover.” You picked up the serving bowl and started toward the dining room. “He’ll go home and I’ll go back to my apartment.”
Penelope watched you for a long moment before speaking, her voice so gentle it almost broke your heart.
“Oh, sweetheart…”
You stopped, but you didn’t turn around.
“That man doesn’t need a nurse. I think he just needs you.”
You closed your eyes.
“Let’s talk about something else,” you said suddenly, forcing another smile onto your face before she could answer. It settled on your lips too easily, practiced from years spent standing in courtrooms where feelings were liabilities instead of truths. “How’s your life going?”
Penelope looked at you for a long moment.
She knew that smile.
It was the one you wore whenever you had already made up your mind. The one that politely informed everyone around you that the discussion was over, whether they agreed or not. She had watched you use it on stubborn witnesses, difficult judges, reporters outside courthouses, and, years ago, on Spencer himself whenever you refused to let him know how frightened you really were.
So she let the subject die.
“Oh, don’t get me started,” she sighed dramatically, accepting your escape with theatrical reluctance as she reached for the serving bowl in your hands. “My dating life continues to resemble an FBI behavioral profile titled Serial Disappointments.”
A laugh escaped you before you could stop it.
“That bad?”
“Sweetie, at this point I’m considering marrying my computer. At least it already knows all my passwords.”
The laughter that followed was quieter than before, but genuine enough to drift through the open doorway separating the kitchen from the living room. It mingled with the clink of ceramic plates, the scrape of silverware against the countertop, cabinet doors closing softly, and the low whistle of the old kettle settling on the stove after being nudged aside. For a brief moment, the house sounded almost exactly as it used to.
Alive.
The sound carried farther than either of you realized.
Out in the living room, Morgan’s shoulders relaxed almost imperceptibly as your laughter reached him through the hallway. He waited until your voices dissolved back into indistinct conversation before turning away from the kitchen and looking across the room at Spencer.
“So.”
Spencer looked up from where he’d been staring toward the hallway for the better part of five minutes.
“So.”
Morgan leaned back against the couch, crossing one ankle over the other as though the conversation were casual.
“How’s it going?”
Spencer instinctively reached toward the bandage on his arm before stopping himself.
“The headache’s improving. The dizziness is mostly positional now. My short-term recall appears unaffected despite the initial concussion symptoms, although I suspect the fatigue will—”
Morgan held up a hand.
“I’m not talking about that.”
“No?” Spencer frowned.
“No.”
Morgan gestured subtly toward the kitchen, where the muffled sound of you and Penelope debating where the serving bowls were kept floated through the house.
“I’m talking about…that.”
Understanding dawned slowly.
“…Oh.”
Morgan settled into the armchair opposite him.
“So?”
“I don’t know.” Spencer said and looked toward the kitchen doorway without really seeing it.
“You don’t know how it’s going?”
“I don’t know what it means.” His voice had quieted considerably. “She’s being kind.”
Morgan nodded.
“But she would’ve done this for anyone.” Spencer added.
“Doubt it.”
Spencer finally looked at him.
“She would’ve helped anyone. We know she’s that kind of person.” Morgan started and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “But she didn’t bring just anyone home, she brought you.”
Morgan didn’t answer immediately.
He simply sat there, elbows resting against his knees, listening as another burst of your laughter drifted from the kitchen. It was softer this time, almost muffled beneath the sound of cabinet doors opening and Penelope’s dramatically offended voice insisting that you had absolutely moved the serving bowls since the last time she’d been here. Spencer smiled before he realized he was doing it, the expression appearing so naturally that it seemed completely disconnected from conscious thought. It was small, but Morgan caught it anyway.
“You still look for her,” he said quietly.
Spencer didn’t answer.
His eyes remained fixed on the kitchen doorway, not really looking at it anymore but listening, waiting for the next sound of your voice the way someone waits for a familiar song to begin again.
“You hear her laugh,” Morgan continued after a moment, “and you stop listening to everything else in the room. You’ve been doing it all evening.”
Spencer lowered his gaze to his hands, fingers absently turning the edge of the blanket draped across his lap. For a long moment he seemed determined not to respond, as though silence alone might be enough to keep everything inside him contained. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped so low Morgan almost had to lean forward to hear it.
“I never stopped loving her.”
There wasn’t any drama in the confession.
No tears or visible breaking apart.
And Morgan wasn’t surprised.
He’d known long before the divorce papers had ever been signed. He’d known because he’d watched Spencer stay at Quantico long after everyone else had gone home, volunteering for every case that crossed the bullpen whether the team needed him or not. He’d watched him bury himself beneath reports, research, lectures, consultations and anything that filled enough hours to postpone returning to an apartment that had become unbearably empty. He’d watched him show up to Rossi’s Sunday dinners with the same polite smile every week, only to spend the evening unconsciously staring at the chair where you used to sit before eventually inventing an excuse about paperwork or an early meeting and leaving before dessert was served. And Morgan had seen heartbreak before. Hell, he’d lived through his own.
But Spencer hadn’t healed from losing you.
He had simply become frighteningly efficient at functioning while carrying the wound.
“I kept waiting for it to get smaller,” Spencer admitted, still staring down at his hands. His thumb drifted unconsciously over the scar across the back of one of them. “People always say grief changes. That eventually it becomes…manageable.” A humorless laugh escaped him. “I thought I’d stop walking past bookstores and wondering whether she’d already bought whatever was in the front window before I had a chance to recommend it.” His voice caught almost imperceptibly. “I thought eventually I’d stop missing her every time the world reminded me she existed.”
Morgan let him speak.
He knew Spencer well enough to recognize how rare this was. Spencer didn’t confess things. He analyzed them, categorized them, buried them beneath statistics and probabilities until they became manageable enough to survive.
“I kept working,” Spencer continued quietly. “More cases. More lectures. More consultations. It made sense mathematically. The fewer hours I spent alone, the fewer opportunities I’d have to think about…” His voice faded. “…her.”
Morgan nodded slowly.
“I know.”
“No.” Spencer shook his head. “I don’t think anyone did.”
Morgan looked at him carefully.
“So why’d you leave?”
Spencer didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, his eyes settled on the scar crossing the back of his own hand, his thumb absently tracing it.
“My mother’s neurologist changed her medication.”
Morgan remembered.
He remembered every frantic phone call Spencer had excused with, “It’s nothing.” Every morning he’d arrived at Quantico looking like he hadn’t slept. Every case where his coffee had gone cold because he’d spent the night in a hospital chair instead of his own bed. He remembered watching Spencer lose weight without seeming to notice, watching exhaustion settle permanently beneath his eyes while he insisted everything was under control.
“It stopped working,” Spencer murmured, his attention never leaving the scar beneath his fingertips. “Around the same time… I started getting migraines.”
“You never told anybody.”
“I told myself they were stress.”
“Were they?”
A bitter smile crossed Spencer’s face.
“I still don’t know.”
Silence stretched between them.
“My memory is…” Spencer swallowed, searching for words he had probably never imagined saying out loud. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever trusted about myself. Intelligence changes. Knowledge expands. Skills deteriorate if you don’t practice them. But memory…” His eyes finally lifted, hollow with something Morgan had never seen in them before. “Memory has always been the constant. It’s who I am.”
Morgan didn’t interrupt.
“Then one morning I walked into Hotch’s office…” Spencer’s expression unfocused, replaying the memory with agonizing clarity. “I reached for the doorknob, walked inside…” His breathing caught almost imperceptibly. “…and I couldn’t remember why I’d gone there.”
He laughed once, but it sounded broken.
“It lasted three seconds.”
Morgan didn’t interrupt.
“Three seconds,” Spencer repeated, almost to himself. “Objectively insignificant. Most people would’ve forgotten it happened before lunch.”
“But you couldn’t.”
“Because I couldn’t afford to.”
His fingers tightened until the tendons in his hand stood out beneath his skin.
“After that…” He exhaled slowly. “I started watching myself.”
The confession sounded almost ashamed.
“Every headache became evidence. Every forgotten word. Every misplaced file. Every moment I lost my train of thought halfway through a sentence.” His jaw tightened. “Every time I walked into a room and needed a second to remember why.”
His breathing became slow, deliberate.
“I was profiling myself.”
Morgan felt something twist painfully in his chest.
“I made lists and I tracked sleep deprivation, migraine frequency, vocabulary retrieval, episodic recall, processing speed.” Spencer’s voice had become frighteningly clinical, as though retreating into science somehow made the memories less terrifying. “I compared my cognitive performance against my own baselines.”
“And what did you find?”
“I found exactly what fear wanted me to find.”
Another burst of laughter floated from the kitchen.
Without thinking, Spencer turned toward the sound.
“When she’d talk about our future…” His entire expression softened before grief quietly erased it again. “She’d already picked baby names.”
Morgan closed his eyes briefly.
“She wanted a little boy who looked like me.” A faint smile appeared despite everything. “She used to wonder whether he’d inherit my curls or her smile. Whether he’d spend afternoons buried in libraries because of me or come home covered in paint because of her.”
The smile vanished.
“And all I could think about…” His voice almost disappeared. “…was whether he’d inherit schizophrenia.”
A long pause.
“Or Alzheimer’s.”
The living room became impossibly still.
“I stopped imagining birthdays.”
His gaze drifted somewhere far beyond the room.
“I started imagining neurologists.”
Morgan said nothing.
“I couldn’t stop seeing her twenty years from now.”
“Forty.”
“It didn’t matter.” Spencer’s voice was barely audible now. “Every version ended the same way.”
His throat tightened.
“I kept seeing her sitting beside my hospital bed exactly the way I used to sit beside my mother’s.” His eyes closed. “Watching me disappear a little at a time. Correcting my memory. Introducing herself to me over and over until one day…” His voice broke for the first time. “…until one day I forgot she had ever been my wife.”
The silence that followed felt sacred.
“I loved her too much to ask her to survive that.”
“I know,” Morgan said softly.
Relief flickered across Spencer’s face, but it lasted less than a second.
“But that’s not what happened.”
Spencer frowned.
“You didn’t save her from watching you get sick.” Morgan leaned forward, his voice calm but unyielding. “You made her watch the man she loved walk away without giving her a reason.”
The words landed with visible force.
“You didn’t spare her grief, Reid.” Morgan shook his head slowly. “You just chose a different version of it.”
Spencer looked away.
“You know what she spent the last two years believing?”
Nothing.
“She believed she wasn’t enough.”
Spencer shut his eyes.
“She believed somewhere along the way you stopped choosing her. That every promise you made together meant less to you than it did to her.” Morgan’s own voice thickened despite himself. “She came to me, you know.”
Spencer looked up.
“She asked if I’d noticed when you started pulling away. Asked if maybe there’d been someone else.” He shook his head slowly. “She kept trying to find a reason because the truth made even less sense.”
Spencer’s face folded inward.
Morgan had seen Spencer cry but somehow this was worse because there weren’t any tears. Just the horrifying realization that every nightmare he’d imagined for you had been replaced by one he’d never considered.
“I thought…” He whispered.
“I know what you thought.”
Morgan’s eyes glistened.
“You thought if she hated you, it’d be easier for her to move on.”
Silence settled heavily over the room.
Morgan let it before he asked quietly,
“Did she?”
Spencer couldn’t answer.
Because less than thirty minutes earlier, you’d stood beneath the shower with sleeves rolled to your elbows, carefully washing his hair so he wouldn’t reopen his stitches. Because you’d buttoned his shirt with hands that still knew him by memory and when he nearly kissed you, you’d almost let him.
Morgan already knew the answer.
“You were wrong.”
Spencer inhaled shakily, his shoulders sagging beneath a weight that suddenly seemed too heavy to carry anymore.
“So…” he asked quietly. “…what am I supposed to do now?”
Morgan looked toward the kitchen where your laughter drifted through the house once again, familiar enough to make the years between then and now disappear for just a moment.
“For the first time in two years,” he said, “stop deciding what’s best for her and use this opportunity to fix it.”
He looked back at Spencer.
“She deserved the truth before you left.”
A pause settled between them before Morgan finished, his voice softer than it had been all evening.
“And if you still love her as much as I know you do…” he said, “…then stop protecting her from a future that doesn’t exist yet and let her decide whether it’s one she’s willing to face with you.”
Spencer stared at him for a long moment before quietly shaking his head.
“Telling her doesn’t change genetics.”
Morgan’s expression softened with something painfully close to pity, but before either of them could say another word, Penelope’s voice carried brightly through the house, cutting effortlessly through the heaviness that had settled over the living room.
“Dinner’s ready! And if you boys don’t get in here in the next thirty seconds, I’m declaring the garlic bread legally abandoned!”
Morgan exhaled through his nose, a sound that might have been a laugh under different circumstances, and pushed himself to his feet. As he passed, he rested a hand against Spencer’s uninjured shoulder, giving it one firm squeeze that lingered just long enough to say everything words no longer could.
“Think about what I said.”
Then he disappeared toward the kitchen, where the warmth of conversation swallowed him almost immediately.
Spencer stayed where he was, only for a few seconds.
Eventually, he stood, careful not to pull too hard against the stitches beneath the fresh bandage. His shoulder protested immediately, the sharp ache radiating down his arm as the lingering concussion left the room swaying almost imperceptibly around him. Under any other circumstances he would have catalogued the symptoms automatically because physical injuries had always obeyed rules, they announced themselves honestly and could be measured, monitored, predicted. Bones knitted. Skin scarred. Neurons recovered. Given enough time, the body almost always found a way to heal itself.
The human heart, he had learned too late, followed no such science.
By the time he reached the dining room, everyone had already slipped into the effortless rhythm they used to share every Sunday evening, as though years had collapsed into minutes while he had remained behind in another lifetime. Penelope was animatedly recounting how she had apparently searched five different cabinets for serving bowls that had been sitting directly in front of her the entire time, accusing the kitchen itself of malicious intent while Morgan laughed so hard he nearly dropped his fork trying to defend the cabinetry. You sat across from her shaking your head with that helpless, affectionate smile you had never quite managed to hide whenever Penelope committed herself wholeheartedly to complete nonsense.
Nobody realized Spencer had stopped in the doorway.
So, for a brief moment, he simply watched.
The dining room glowed beneath the warm light suspended above the table. Steam curled lazily upward from the food Morgan and Penelope had brought, carrying the scent of roasted garlic, rosemary, butter and fresh bread through the house. Someone reached across the table for the pepper. Glasses clinked gently together.
It was ordinary.
Ordinary in the quiet ways that had once made Spencer believe this life could never disappear. There had been a time when he assumed evenings like this would simply continue indefinitely, accumulating one after another until they became decades.
Oh.
Then you looked up.
The moment your eyes found him, you smiled automatically, the expression arriving before thought ever had the chance to intervene. Without interrupting your conversation with Penelope, your foot hooked gently around the empty chair beside you, pulling it away from the table just enough that he wouldn’t have to wrestle with it using one injured arm. It was an almost invisible movement, so absentminded that no one else even noticed it had happened.
Spencer did.
Because he remembered the first time you had done it when he had thanked you.
You had laughed and told him that married people eventually stopped thanking each other for things like that because love, after enough years, stopped announcing itself. It became instinct and lived in gestures so ordinary they disappeared almost as quickly as they happened. A mug of tea already waiting before the other person realized they wanted one. Picking up their favorite cereal during grocery shopping without checking the pantry first. Straightening a crooked tie in the middle of a conversation neither of you would remember the next day. Sliding out a chair because your body had memorized someone else’s comfort long before your mind thought about it.
Love had never lived inside declarations, it had always hidden itself inside habit.
His chest tightened so suddenly it became difficult to tell whether the ache came from grief or from the bruising beneath his ribs.
Because your body remembered him, even after everything.
You were still quietly dividing the food into portions before anyone asked. Still passing Morgan the pepper without him reaching for it because you knew he’d want it eventually. Still carefully avoiding the mushrooms on Penelope’s plate because she insisted she hated them unless they were chopped so finely she couldn’t identify them. Still noticing that Spencer’s glass was empty before he’d realized it himself, your hand already reaching for the pitcher without interrupting the conversation unfolding around you.
You had loved people for so long that kindness had become involuntary.
You had loved him for so long that caring for him still happened before you remembered you weren’t supposed to anymore.
Only then did Spencer move, lowering himself carefully into the chair beside you. The movement pulled uncomfortably against the stitches beneath the fresh bandage, but before he had even settled completely, you had already turned toward him.
“Does your arm hurt?”
The question was so simple that it almost undid him.
Not Why did you leave me? Not Why wasn’t I enough? Not Did you ever stop loving me? There was no accusation hidden beneath your voice, no bitterness sharpened into politeness, no attempt to collect the explanations you had deserved two years ago and never received. You looked at him with nothing more complicated than concern, as though the first thing that mattered after everything that had happened was whether he was in pain.
He wondered, with a guilt so profound it bordered on unbearable, how someone whose heart he had broken so completely still instinctively reached for his wounds before her own.
For as long as Spencer could remember, his life had been governed by a single certainty: every mystery surrendered eventually to knowledge. Every impossible equation possessed an answer whether humanity had discovered it yet or not. Every cipher could be broken, every pattern understood, every unanswered question yielded eventually to enough intelligence. It was the principle that had shaped him long before the FBI, long before profiling. When his mother became ill, he had met terror the only way he knew how. He had read every paper ever published on schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, memorized neurological pathways until he could sketch them from memory, devoured clinical trials, inheritance models, molecular studies, experimental therapies. He had learned languages simply because another country’s research might contain a sentence no one had translated yet. Somewhere, he had believed it with the stubborn conviction only geniuses and desperate sons possessed, there had to be an answer hidden inside enough information.
There wasn’t.
For the first time in his life, Spencer Reid had found a problem intelligence could not solve. No theorem could rewrite a strand of DNA. No probability model could bargain with heredity. No amount of brilliance could negotiate with fear. And somewhere between trying to outrun a future that might never come, he had forgotten the one variable he had never had the right to remove from the equation.
You.
His eyes drifted almost involuntarily toward your left hand as you reached across the table for the bread basket, your fingers brushing absentmindedly against Morgan’s before apologizing with a smile that came as naturally to you as breathing.
The ring was gone.
He had been the one who slipped it from your finger in a lawyer’s office that smelled faintly of coffee and old paper, convincing himself that every signature he placed on those documents was another act of love. He remembered how cold your hands had been that day. He remembered noticing the pale indentation the band had left behind after years against your skin and wondering, absurdly, how long it would take for it to disappear.
He knew now.
Two years.
Long enough for the mark to fade, but not nearly long enough for the absence to stop hurting.
Yet memory betrayed reality with effortless precision. And for one impossible heartbeat he saw the gold band exactly where it had belonged, catching the warm dining room light as you laughed over something Penelope had said, your fingers colliding with his while both of you reached for the last piece of bread. He remembered saving part of every paycheck because nothing displayed beneath those jewelry store lights had ever seemed worthy enough of you. He remembered visiting three different shops before finding the one you had insisted was “far too expensive,” only for you to burst into tears when he opened the little velvet box because, in your own words, it looked like forever.
Forever.
Such a deceptively simple word.
Such an impossible promise.
For someone who had built his entire identity around certainty, forever should have been the easiest concept to reject. There was no mathematical proof for permanence. Entropy alone guaranteed that everything eventually unraveled. Stars exhausted themselves. Languages died. Civilizations disappeared beneath the earth. Every statistical model pointed toward impermanence.
And yet…he had believed in forever the moment you slid that ring onto your finger.
Not because the odds supported it.
Because you did.
The laughter around the table continued uninterrupted. Morgan was insisting he’d only taken one potato while Penelope accused him of crimes against carbohydrates with the theatrical indignation only she could manage. You quietly reached across the table to refill Spencer’s glass without asking if he wanted more water, your hand finding the pitcher almost before he’d realized it was empty. It was such an ordinary gesture that no one else noticed.
You had loved him for so long that your body still remembered him, even when your heart had every reason to forget. And that, more than anything Morgan had said, became the realization Spencer could not survive.
Because the future he had spent two years trying to protect you from had never arrived. Instead, he had created one infinitely crueler.
He had feared a disease that might one day make him forget the woman he loved, so he had left while he still remembered her perfectly.
As conversation carried on around him and warmth filled every corner of the room, Spencer found himself wondering whether every great tragedy began the same way: not with cruelty, nor hatred, nor even the absence of love, but with one terrified person convincing themselves that destroying something beautiful today was kinder than risking its loss tomorrow.
He had spent years believing the cruelest inheritance his family carried was written into its genes.
He knew better now.
Fear could be inherited too.
And unlike every illness he had ever devoted his life to understanding, this one had no treatment, no trial, no cure waiting somewhere inside another language, another country, another forgotten journal article.
Because this disease had never lived inside his blood, it had lived inside a single decision and he would carry its symptoms for the rest of his life.
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