CLANDESTINE : Spencer Reid

52

A blaring alarm startles me awake. My heart surges in my chest and my eyes fly open. Beside me, a groan escapes Spencer's lips. One of his arms is on my chest, heavy weight holding me to the ground. Pinning me down. The alarm is beeping through the silence of the room, quiet with light flooding the room underneath the crack of the curtain.

I turn to look at Spencer who has eyes crewed tightly shut and a clenched brow.

"It's my..." he yawns, otherwise so quiet and still. I'm trapped beneath him. While he is thin, he feels so much heavier on me. "It's my work phone."

So, not an alarm. At least, not an alarm signalling our impending doom like I thought. No, it signals someone else's, someone far away who needs Reid's help. And the rest of the BAU. Our coworkers are probably being called in too. I can't move though. My body is tightly trapped beneath his grip.

"Spencer," I whisper his name.

He yawns again, pulling himself off me and beginning to sit up. The ringing stops midway through the gesture. He grunts, spine held in a stiff position. The floor has done him no good. I'm aware that my back hurts, somewhere in the disks that separate the bones in my spine, somewhere that there isn't as much adrenaline as the rest of me. My head is pounding. Then, I jump.

His phone starts to ring again.

He stands up, one hand on his lower back as he stumbles through the room. I doubt he's still drunk. I feel painfully coldly sober. Now, more than ever, I'm aware of what it means to be held down to the ground. The only places I've allowed myself to keep are on patches stitched to my favourite backpack. Now, I feel like I'm tacked to it as well. My body spread flat and sewn down, every nook of my skin aching with the sting of a needle pulled through it.

"It's Reid," he answers, his voice quiet. He presses his fingers to his forehead. "I'm almost three hours away right now. Can I..."

He stops talking. The room is quiet. I shift the lone blanket off me and look for my bag. It's right outside the bathroom. Then, I take the opportunity to run inside the bathroom. My hands wrap around the taps, blasting on the cold water, and then I throw it onto my face. The chill makes my whole head shake. I grab one of the folded hand towels and douse it with the water before bringing it up to my cheeks. I scrub my face, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. My head tingles with the same pain of a brain freeze. I pull back, stare at myself in the mirror.

The same girl looks back at me as the one yesterday. The same red hair, the same freckled and pink face, the same dewy wide look in my eyes. It's all different though. The look in my eyes. It's not about the way my eyes look but the way my eyes look back.

I reach a hand up. My finger trails the over the pink flesh of my lips. It looks no different. There is no proof anything has changed. No quantitative observations to be made about my body obviously, but maybe nothing even qualitative.

I kissed him.

Nevermind that I kissed someone for the first time since. I didn't even kiss Luc after all of it happened. Not even a kiss on my sister's cheek. Nevermind that though. I suppose in my wild days in Australia, the ones that sort of blur together, I know I must have, when I was black out drunk and woke up in the bed of someone who's body I remember but name I've forgotten. So, theoretically someone, but more like anyone. Nevermind that.

I didn't just kiss anyone. I kissed Dr. Spencer Reid, the man who sits across from me every day at work. Someone who works for the FBI, who I can't just disappear from, who is extraordinarily close with a group of people who make it their mission to find people.