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Experience tells her that this is most definitely an unhealthy coping mechanism, but she doesn’t really care.
Her fingers twist in Spencer Reid’s hair. She holds him tight against her, feeling the muscles as they slide and tense beneath his skin. He drags his teeth across her neck, the lip just skimming her pulsating jugular, and he groans the word fuck into her ear.
Her breath catches in her throat. Her back arches and her lips move, as if in supplication, or prayer.
But she does not make a sound.
She does not even know what name to call. To use the name “Spencer” would suggest an intimacy far deeper than she cared to admit; to use “Reid” implies a distance too great to endure.
So she stays silent.
They live in that silence, in that fateful dividing line, that uncertain boundary between so close and so far.
-
Sometimes lies are easier to bear than truth.
Her life before the shooting had been nothing but one big, beautiful lie, after all. There are times when, enduring the whispers and stares of her worried colleagues, or waking from a suffocating nightmare, she catches herself wishing she could return to that safe lie. Anything would be better than ugly reality and this hell that is her life now. She knows who she really is, now.
So when she’s with Spencer, she lies. To herself. To him. There’s safety in untruth, and bliss in self-deception.
Stress relief.
His face drags across her breasts and he takes one of her nipples into his mouth.
Distraction.
His roving mouth moves lower and she emits a throaty gasp.
Just working out the kinks.
His hand finds hers and he laces their fingers together. She coils and whimpers under the pressure of his tongue. Her hot breath fogs in the frigid air.
No strings attached.
She writhes.
I don’t love him.
His hand is still holding hers.
He doesn’t love me.
Yeah, lies are easier than truth.
-
‘Don’t be nice to me,’ is her rule, and it applies in the bedroom as well.
She chases the gentleness from his caresses, tells him harder, faster, teases and goads him until he loses all inhibitions. Their sex becomes rough and argumentative. At times it’s like a fight. They score and bite each other. She prefers to let him take her from behind so she doesn’t have to look into those eyes.
After every encounter they come out covered in bruises, bites and scratches. She encourages him to mar her body, and she wears them with a mixture of pride and guilt. Long sleeves and collars conceal them from the world, but when she undresses at night it brings her satisfaction to see them.
She thinks of the Fisher King’s hands. They had been large and strong, and scarred. She thinks of the scar he’d given her, and how he’d dug into her fresh wound. How he’d coated his fingers with her blood, painted the walls of her own apartment with it as she lay, dying.
It makes bile rise in her throat. She feels tainted by it. The revulsion is so strong it feels as though maggots are crawling under her skin.
It’s eating her alive.
So she calls Reid, and he fucks her until she forgets what anything feels like.
-
It disturbs Elle how easily she’s able to decipher what he's thinking. He can communicate entire volumes in those tragic glances of his.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she says sharply.
She’s sitting on the edge of the bed. Reid lies behind her. His chest rises and falls once. ‘Like what?’ he asks.
‘Like you…’ she cannot finish the sentence.
He surveys her for a moment. Then he gets up and dresses quietly. He leaves, according to their arrangement.
He’s always been good like that. Always respectful. Always mindful of the boundaries she puts up. Never one to go breaking down walls.
His side of the bed is still warm. Elle puts her hand on the mattress, stroking the faint impression he left on the sheets.
She lays her head upon the bed and keeps her hand there until it grows cold.
-
He holds her so tight she cannot breathe.
One of his hands is wrapped around her throat. He pushes into her from behind and bites down on her earlobe as he does. She hisses, and when she cries out with pain at a rough thrust he can’t help but pause and murmur if she’s okay. She thought she had trained him better than that, but he still has lapses. Still tries to be gentle with her. Forgets that he's not supposed to hold her afterwards, or look at her as though he loves her, or ask these concerned questions.
She lowers her head and he releases her throat. She grasps one of his fingers between her teeth and bites hard.
He hisses and pulls on her hair until she lets go. Taking one hand, she guides it to her clit and tells him not to hold back.
She’s so hot and slick that he doesn't need much more encouragement. She tells him, harder, and he obliges.
She’s sore afterwards, and he seems slightly regretful. He strokes the hair from her neck so he can trace the vivid bite marks he left on her skin.
She shrugs him off.
But he persists. He tries to caress her. Asks if she wants anything. When this fails, he gets up and dresses.
He tries to talk to her about Morgan, and something Hotch said yesterday. He even asks about her mother, but she remains mute.
‘Why don’t you speak to me anymore?’ he asks. The question comes out while he is still only half-dressed, watching her pensively as she sits on the side of the bed, her arms crossed over herself. In wounded tones, he continues, ‘I could always talk to you.’
A hot tear trickles down her face, and she wipes it away, furiously. The dull, apathetic silence lengthens and he gives up.
She’s always pretended to hate his ceaseless wittering and his endless questions.
But she knows it’s her silences he can’t stand.
-
It hurts her to recall how hopeful he’d been after their first fitful, fumbling time together. She still remembers the way he’d looked at her – so tenderly, with such adoration, almost with reverence. It had been too much to stand. He’d reached for her, and she'd shrunk away in fear, flinching from his touch. There was too much love in it, too much like –
‘Don’t be nice to me,’ she’d said.
She can still conjure the image of Reid’s face, hurt and slightly bewildered. But he had not questioned it. He acquiesced to her demands as he so often did, and every time she called him, he responded without fail.
For all that she tells herself about him despite his awkwardness, he’s still a man , and assuring herself that he must be happy with this purely physical arrangement of theirs, she knows that the distance she keeps between them, even when they’re so close, wounds him. It’s cruel, in a way, monstrously cruel to deny him in one way while satisfying him in another.
But still he comes. Every time she calls, he comes to her without fail. All it takes is three words - I need you - and he’s there.
-
He makes love to her like he’s drowning. He throws himself against her with a wild, rough futility, as though he’s desperate to be as close to her as he possibly can, desperate to make the most of those precious moments he has before she spurns his touch once more. Clumsy, awkward phrases of love and devotion crowd on his tongue, and they slip out occasionally.
She rebuffs him brutally every time.
She craves intimacy almost to the point of madness, but still she cannot bear to hear those words. Not from Reid.
Not from him, surely.
-
‘I don’t know if I can do this anymore.’
He tells her quietly. His upper lip is stiff but his Adam’s apple quivers, a subtle indicator of the great grief he holds back. All it takes is one look and she divines just how much this arrangement is torturing him. Guilt sweeps through her and she can’t stop herself from throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him.
He kisses her back. His cheek is wet. ‘Why won’t you let me love you?’ he asks desperately. ‘Why can’t I love you?’
A low sob rises within her and she continues to kiss him with a wild, desperate, drowning passion that matches his own. He responds. His brows are creased and she knows he doesn't fully understand why she acts the way she does. Her heart is a mystery to him, even when the contents of his own dear broken heart are startlingly clear to her.
They make love. They strip to nothing and clasp each other as tightly as shipwrecked lovers in the wide, dark sea. Elle goes on top and her eyes don't leave him. Not for a single second.
He says her name when he comes.
She collapses on top of him. Rolling to the side, she looks at him, her chest heaving. He reaches out with trembling fingers, finds her scar and traces the puckered mark fearfully, regretfully. Knowing how she’s hurt his poor heart is too much to bear. She turns away from him, and suddenly she says it:
“I love you.”
Tears are falling silently down her face, and she hates it, because she’s not a crier. He rises up at the words and wraps his arms around her, holding her breathlessly tight. His kisses fall like rain, and he’s crying too, and every tragic kiss confirms that yes , he loves her in return, he’s always loved her.
She holds him close as he strokes her hair and cheek. The truth is terrible, but it is inescapable. Yes, she thinks, turning her head into his hand and kissing his palm, yes, she loves him. She even dreams of a life with him, and of a place where they might live together without the need to hide, without fear of the water and all it destroys.
But where? What place could there possibly be for them? Where could they be free of the ghosts that haunt them? There is no place for them in this world. No place for that elusive us.
‘What are we going to do?’ he whispers.
She doesn’t have the answers. He knows the difficulty, the awkwardness, the impossibility of their situation as well as she does. But even despite the futility they are faced with, he does not let her go.
Unwilling to let him go, yet unable to keep him close, Elle allows herself to cling to him just for this moment. Trapped on an island of uncertainty between so close and so far, she can only hope the waters don’t drown her.