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“Did you know that, um, she, uh, we… I kissed her in the pool?” Reid looked up at Morgan from his desk, not quite sure who should be the subject of his sentence.
Lila had done most of the action. She pulled him into the pool, and then she pulled his tie to bring her lips to his. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t kissed her back. It takes (at least) two people to kiss (consensually). And maybe he was kind of impressed with himself for kissing a Hollywood actress, so he wanted to take a little credit. Even if it kind of felt like an out of body experience.
“It’s so weird. It doesn’t even feel like it really happened, you know?” Reid looked back down at the tabloid magazine in front of him, a yellow frame around a photo of his hand on Lila’s shoulder. He could only imagine what was on that roll of film that Elle ruined from the paparazzi guy they caught before they found the real unsub. Thank goodness for Elle.
Morgan laughed, flashing the cheeky smile that Reid had gotten used to trying to ignore. There was a specific smile Morgan had when he was teasing Reid, a warm one, like he wanted to make sure Reid knew he was joking around. “Sure, sure, she’s a beautiful young actress.” Morgan replied.
Reid considered that for a moment. He hadn’t kissed very many people in his lifetime. Most of his classmates were much older than him anyway. There was the girl in middle school on the math team, but that barely counted. They had only pecked after winning regionals.
Then there was the undergrad boy in the library who talked to him every day while he was working on his masters, who always ate lemon poppy seed muffins, and on Reid’s last day of school, the boy took him to a dusty corner of the library and kissed him, pressing him up against the Egyptology section. His mouth tasted like lemons, just as Reid expected, but he kind of liked that. But the boy had laughed because Reid didn’t close his eyes.
Reid didn’t realize that was required for kissing, but he made sure to close his eyes the next time. His study group had dragged him to a party and didn’t stop his skinny, lightweight, twenty year old, never-been-drunk-before self from getting wasted off his ass. They found him passed out on the bathroom floor with a hickey, and Reid could only tell them it was a redhead, but he couldn’t even remember if it was a boy or a girl. Needless to say, he didn’t drink again for years.
There were a few more, mostly academics with no social life, like himself, that he felt comfortable with. Nerds were attracted to him, because he was some kind of king of the nerds. Never in his life had someone like Lila ever looked his way, at least not seriously. Reid was at most part of some weird fantasy to them, especially since his knowledge of psychology made them feel like he could read their minds, and sometimes that was hot, or something.
But with Lila, it had been different. He wasn’t some nerd legend to her. He was a cool, brave FBI agent assigned to be her bodyguard, but because he wasn’t all stiff and tough like Hotch and Gideon, he was accessible, human to her.
“Yeah, you know, I kept explaining to her about transference, and the fact that, you know, she probably only liked me because I was there to protect her.” Reid confessed, giving up on it.
“Reid.” Morgan stopped him before he could ramble, pushing off the table he was leaning on with his distracting biceps that threatened the hems of his short sleeve shirt. Reid pulled his eyes back to Morgan’s, expecting to be teased again or something. But instead, Morgan continued, “You were her hero.”
Reid thought about the word hero, and all of its nuanced stereotypes. Batman and James Bond were heroes. Sure, he put meticulous, evasive killers away all the time, but Reid couldn’t even pass his shooting tests. “I wanted to think that…”
“No, no, no. Don’t go selling yourself short, kid.” Morgan cut him off again. “You took down an armed subject without firing a shot. You saved her life.”
Maybe Morgan was right. Usually it was Morgan or Elle or Hotch that did all the creeping around with guns and punching and kicking. When the team had a warrant to enter a potential unsub’s home, Reid was always the last to enter doorways, the others jumping into danger head first. But Reid was all alone with Lila and the unsub, and he… He handled it all by himself. He made the unsub angry at him instead of the object of her obsession. He made her make an irrational decision that gave him an opening to disarm her.
“That’s pretty much a hero in my book,” Morgan went on, and he smiled again. But this smile was different. It was still just as blinding as his teasing one, but this one was a little softer. It was nice of him to reassure Reid like this, when Reid had gotten a little too mixed up in the case.
“Let me ask you this. Have you ever crossed professional boundaries with a victim of a case you were working on?” Reid knew Morgan had his fair share of romantic adventures, and he suddenly felt kind of curious about it.
Morgan crossed his arms and laughed, that familiar teasing twinkle back in his eyes. “No,” He replied. Reid could sense maybe just a little bit of jealousy in his body language and tone. Of course he’d be jealous. Reid made out with a bombshell blonde in her pool, and Morgan loved the drama and the scandal of it all. What Reid wasn’t quite sure of was his own reaction towards the idea of Morgan being jealous. Why did he kind of like that Morgan was jealous? He never thought of himself as competitive in the romance arena. He had admitted to Elle that he’d never even asked anyone out on a date. It just wasn’t one of his priorities in life.
Anyways, it didn’t matter. He shouldn’t have gotten himself mixed up with Lila. It was unprofessional. “It’s pretty bad, right?” He asked sheepishly.
“Some things you can’t control even with that big ol’ brain of yours. No harm, no foul.” Morgan was chuckling, and it was like the constant monologuer in Reid’s brain tripped on something, and he thought nothing except Morgan chuckle, Morgan chuckle, for just a millisecond, and then it was back to his scheduled programming of statistics and random tidbits. “Let it go,” Morgan told him, and he began to walk away.
But Reid was still burning with curiosity, for some strange reason. Well, it wasn’t that curiosity was strange for him, it was just strange for him to be stuck on this particular subject. But he did kind of want advice from someone who knew what he was doing. “Hey Morgan?” He called to him as Morgan put on his leather jacket, those silly biceps flexing again. “Has there ever been a girl that you wanted to be with for more than, you know, just one night?”
Morgan froze. “Excuse me?” He walked slowly back towards Reid.
“I’ve… I’ve never seen you with the same girl twice.” Reid stumbled over his words a little bit, realizing too late that maybe his question was a little… blunt. But it wouldn’t be the first time, and the teasing smile was back on Morgan’s face, so he knew he hadn’t offended too much.
“What, are you calling me a dog?” Morgan threw his hands up.
“N-n-no, not at all. I’m just trying to figure out if this feeling I have is ever gonna go away.” Reid thought about Lila kissing him in the pool again, and his stomach made knots. Whoever had described this as “getting butterflies” was a little off the mark. For Reid, it was always knots and backflips.
“Reid, what we do for a living, it takes up all our time. And a relationship’s hard enough, even in the same city.” Morgan leaned back on the desk across from Reid’s and threw his right leg over his left.
“So, I mean, you’re saying it’s probably wise that I don’t call her, right?” Reid spun his chair back and forth, mulling everything over. Even if he had been Lila’s hero that night, it would probably wear off. Not many people could ever put up with Reid for that long. Morgan was one of the few who were still amused every time Reid embarrassed himself or said something off the wall that was actually on the mark, whereas others ended up getting annoyed. And Lila didn’t seem like the type to be able to put up with the morbidity of Reid and Morgan’s mundane.
“I can’t answer that one for you,” Morgan told him. “Here, I’ll tell you what I do know. You don’t need to come up with that answer tonight.”
A lot of pressure was lifted off of Reid when Morgan said that. He raised an eyebrow and nodded. Unlike most of the decisions he made, no one’s life was riding on this one.
“I’m out.” Morgan waved and headed out of the office.
“Have a good weekend,” Reid called to him, not really wanting him to leave, but also remembering that it was past eleven on a Friday night, and Morgan was entitled to something fun, besides hanging around while Reid finished up his reports.
“Yeah, you too, Romeo.” Morgan turned to look at him one last time before leaving the office. As he disappeared from view, Reid’s stomach felt funny. He had just critiqued the phrase “getting butterflies,” but now he could almost see what people meant by that. They were violent, trapped butterflies, but they were indeed butterflies sometimes.
Reid thought again about Lila pulling his tie in the pool, testing out how his stomach felt. No, those were knots again. Strange. He looked at the tabloid again, noticing for the first time that in the corner, he recognized a shoulder that could only be Morgan’s, but the photographer had cut off Morgan’s face to get a clear shot of Reid and Lila.
He realized that whatever he and Lila had shared, it was as fleeting as the gossip in these silly tabloids. Sure she was nice, but kissing her was kind of like trying to fit a triangular block in a square shaped hole. If he did ever try to fill that hole again, he needed to fill it with someone that fit, someone that he could get along with, someone he could share the burden of his work with, someone he could share the… quirks of his brain with, to put it nicely.
Tossing the tabloid in the trash, Reid stood up from his desk, leaving the rest of the reports for another day. He headed out of the office and pressed the elevator call button, thinking about the kind of person he would want to pull his tie like that. He walked into the elevator with his head down, and almost smacked right into Morgan.
“Woah, hey Romeo. I realized I forgot some stuff in the briefing room upstairs. Did that big brain of yours figure out if you’re gonna call her yet?” Morgan joked.
“Yes.” Reid replied flatly.
“Really? What did you decide?” Morgan’s smile lit up the dim elevator. Why did everything Reid did warrant that big grin?
“I’m not going to call her.” Reid replied, crossing his arms. Saying it out loud made him feel confident in his decision.
Morgan raised his eyebrows. Reid could see the faintest amount of air leave his lungs, almost as if he was relieved. “How’d you come to that decision?” Morgan asked. Reid looked at him and was struck by his own blindness. The answer was painfully obvious. Of course. How did he miss it? He psychoanalyzed master criminals for a living but heaven forbid he try to understand himself.
“Derek, I uh…” Reid found himself looking at his shoes.
“Spencer, for someone who talks all day about everything under the sun…” Morgan stepped closer to him, assaulting him with that… that grin, the crinkles in the corner of his eyes, the playfulness of his voice. “You sure don’t say my first name often.”
“You don’t say mine very often either,” Spencer replied, finally understanding the true meaning of “getting butterflies” as he braved a glance at Derek’s face. Once he looked, he couldn’t tear his eyes away, not that he wanted to.
As Derek leaned in to kiss him, he grabbed the end of Spencer’s tie. Spencer snuck his hands just inside Derek’s leather jacket, shamelessly aching to touch Derek’s pecs. The butterflies stopped their fluttering and his inner monologue shut the fuck up, letting Spencer just… enjoy the moment.
Then the elevator dinged and the doors slid open, and the security guard waiting for the elevator let out a surprised little “oh.”
Spencer pulled away immediately, thrown violently back into reality, a blush creeping up his cheeks. His big brain thought it would be a good idea to smile at the security guard and say, “Hi.” Derek burst out laughing. The security guard decided to take the stairs.
“Come on, Romeo.” Derek slung an arm around Spencer’s shoulders and led him out of the building and into the chilly Virginia night.