CLANDESTINE : Spencer Reid

27

Morgan laughs from beside me as I continue to struggle with my log-in, "if you need to call Garcia over again-"

"I've got it," I snap. Damn, new BlackBerry.

"Hey, don't snap at me," he says. "It's a sure way to get your name drawn for the gala next time."

I glare at him. It's been two weeks since that gala, and while he doesn't know I had a good time, Morgan doesn't stop bringing it up. We're just back from lunch and I was hoping to get some work done this afternoon, rather than listen to him drone.

As I stand up, he chuckles, "biting the bullet with Garcia, huh?"

"Lord have mercy on me," I mutter as I walk away.

I dip down the hallway, knocking on Garcia's door. She calls me in. Her strokes on the keyboard thunder through the dark room. Her face is barely lit by the dark screen in front of her. As I step closer, she closes the tab and wheels around to face me. I pass her the phone as she takes it, looking over it.

Now that I've been here almost a year, the FBI paid for it. Hotch explained I need a work phone. Apparently, lots of people have work cell phones as well as personal phones, and since they might need me after-hours, most of the cost was covered. I wanted to keep my older one as my work phone, the one without GPS, but I'll take what I can get.

She turns back to typing and fiddling with he phone for a minute. A call rings from her desk phone. She picks it up and slams it down.

"Busy day."

"Always," she mutters.

I mean, I'm not too sure about that. One of her bobble heads shakes as she types and clicks around her desktop. I watch its head move.

"Here," she says, passing my work phone back. She also hands me my old cell phone. "This one's clean of any confidential documents and contacts. I kept the marine on there."

"Did you look up my contacts?" I furrow my brow.

She grins at me, wide and bright, "only the ones I thought were interesting. Your brothers are cute."

"Bye, Garcia," I wave at her as I leave the room.

The thundering continues before I even make it to the door.

I try my best to match her energy for the rest of the day, working as hard as I can. Morgan doesn't get another chance to bother me, and on time I'm out the door, hitting the elevator before anyone else. My hands ache. I stretch them while I walk home. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be able to do it, now that it's early September.

Once I'm home, I fumble with the locked door. My hands still hurt. I finally get the key in, and before I can twist it, the door swings open. Estelle hugs me in the doorway, her grip tight. Her hair is longer than it was before and it smells like coconuts. She grins.

"How are you?" she nearly squeals. "You look good."

"How are you?" I counter. She's home a two weeks earlier than I thought she'd be. We were worried we might not even see each other because I'm flying to New York to see my siblings that weekend. "You're the one who's been around the world?"

She smiles. We head inside the apartment. She's already stalked the fridge with groceries. Estelle gets me a drink from the fridge as if she isn't the one who was on a twelve-hour flight to get here. She is dead tired, clearly, but she's determined to go to bed at eleven to fix her jetlag.

"Sorry I didn't give any notice," she says. "My supervisor wanted me to come back early. I'm the head TA for a class and I'm not really prepared for it. Undergrads are already two weeks into classes."