Disclosure: Nope, they aren't mine and Lord knows I make no profit off them -- except for the psychic satisfaction and amusement of pushing them into new and uncomfortable roles.
A/N #1: Turns out that writing stuff from Reid's POV is strange. Illuminating, occasionally amusing, but … strange. I'm not sure I would want to live in his head on a regular basis.
A/N #2: I wanted to avoid dragging this out into chapters, but the holidays have fractured time around here so dramatically that I'll have to fall back on a drop-and-insert narrative. Hope nobody minds.
The Structure of His Spontaneity
As an exceptionally intelligent and well-educated person, Spencer Reid knew that what he was doing at this juncture in his personal life was possibly bone-deep stupid and potentially career suicide. (And that was a significant part of the thrill, of course.)
For almost four years, he had kept his interest and participation in the Dom/sub culture carefully walled off from his fellow profilers at the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit.
He had not feared their disapproval or shock. Rather, his motive had been to avoid the inevitable (duh) behavioral analysis of his preferences, the frowns and nods and, It's a response to the brutal bullying he endured as a child prodigy-blah-de-blah-de-fuckin'-blah, or whatever the interpretation of the week might be.
The kind of attitude that dismissed "Jeez, dudes, I do this because I like to do this. Live with it!" as a steaming heap of denial on toast points.
It had never been his intention to involve any of his teammates in this other area of his life – and not the least because when you came right down to it, all that successful Dom/sub amounted to was, um, profiling. It was fast, accurate profiling of what one's partner at this instant most and least wanted, and determining in which proportions to dish out those desires and terrors for maximum satisfaction all around.
Involving his teammates, he had figured, would be like playing Dueling Profilers with a chance of scattered orgasm.
That had been before Emily Prentiss hit a speed bump on the road to love and started ricocheting around in search of someone to take control of her, and Reid had never been able to resist closet nerds like Emily. But that was all history, since Emily now aspired to be a Top and just came to Spencer for coaching.
The current problem lay with the fact that, due to some I've-had-a-bad-week-so-don't-fuck-with-me bravura horseshit challenge he had thrown at Hotchner and Morgan a couple months back, in slightly less than an hour, when Derek Morgan arrived – if Derek Morgan arrived – Spencer Reid, PhD, would be officially engaged in Dom/sub relationships with three of the six people he had least intended to involve in his recreational pursuits.
And for every one of his genius-class neurons that jumped up and down and screamed Danger-Will-Robinson! another three lay back and drawled, Damn, this is gonna be fun.
But anyhow …
He paced his apartment one last time. He could always improvise, the way he had at Aaron Hotchner's, but a good session, like a good interrogation, benefited from careful staging. He stopped three times at the antique ladder-back chair, tilting it backwards with the arch of his right foot, making sure that it balanced -- and that it landed just right against the lip of the book shelf, at a perfect forty-two degree angle, just in case.
He folded and refolded the canvas for the evening's artistic endeavor. It was a seven-by-fifteen-foot swath of white polar fleece folded into thirds and rolled into a bolster he could easily unfurl into a makeshift mattress. Morgan's skin would glow like burnished mahogany against that background.
As he heard the growl of Morgan's car with its (unnecessarily) high-performance engine, he slipped out of his shoes and pitched them with casual accuracy from the bedroom door into his closet. He had selected a neutral mismatch for the night's socks: one gray and violet, and the other cornflower blue. He glanced down at his feet and wiggled his toes, watching their reflection in the highly polished wood of the hall, his favorite floor in the apartment.
When the elevator made that funny cough it always gave as it left the garage level, he checked his reflection in the hallway mirror. His hair was too tidy. He rumpled it a bit more. While he was at it, he tugged his tie half an inch looser and skewed it to one side.
Nice.
It's all in the staging, my friends.
* * * * *
"You're lookin' good, man," Morgan said, by which he meant, You're looking pretty much the way I expected you to look. By which he probably meant, You haven't shaved your head and you aren't dressed all in leather. Or maybe he meant, You don't look like a refugee from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or maybe just, Thank God you aren't in drag.
Reid, who didn't talk all that much about his sexual orientation, but who – for the record – considered himself functionally bisexual and preferentially hetero, just nodded amiably and went to get Morgan a beer.
When he returned, he twisted the cap off, handed the bottle and a glass to Morgan, and said, "Have you been thinking about that stuff I told you?"
Morgan set the glass aside and took several swallows from the bottle.
Ugh, me Alpha Male.
"I have," he said. "And I looked it up online and I even dug through my old psych texts. So, yeah – if we have a level of trust here, then I'm willing to give it a try."
OK, maybe not so Alpha. Maybe Reid was slapping some of his own expectations on Morgan.
Reid dropped into an adjacent armchair. "Well, I hope we've built up a level of trust over the years," he said with a timid smile. He worked the knot in his tie loose and pulled it off, throwing it carelessly on the coffee table.
Morgan eyed the tie suspiciously, as if it would ultimately end up tying him to a chair. Reid ignored Morgan's doubts, because misdirection is a magician's – and a Dominant's – best friend.
"Why don't you relax, too?" he asked. He slipped off his chair and knelt down before Morgan, who shrank back slightly in his seat as though he feared Spencer might lunge forward and sink his fangs into
Derek's crotch. Reid sat back on his heels, quiet, expectant, almost subservient, sending all the wrong messages. "May I help you with your tie?" He even ducked his head once, as though hardly daring to touch Morgan in any way.
Before Reid was born, his mother and some of her faculty friends had gone to see a performance of Gounod's opera Faust in which Méphistophélès had been played by a particularly charismatic basso. He still remembered the way the women, years later, described in wonder how the devil knelt humbly before Faust, and then, seemingly without moving a muscle, the singer/actor made it clear that he was the master, even though he remained on his knees.
Although the performer had died before Spencer was born, he held the image of that performance up as a goal he would like to achieve some day. And while he was a long way from meeting that goal, he had learned to make the most of kneeling.
Carefully, he reached up and picked at the knot in Derek Morgan's tie. Once he had it undone, he tugged at the end, slowly slipping it out from under Morgan's collar.
"Uh-uh," Morgan said, catching the end in his fingers. "You're up to something."
Spencer let his shoulders droop. "So much for a level of trust," he sighed. "Here." He held out his crossed wrists, inviting Morgan to tie him up. "I'm not up to anything. Go ahead, do whatever helps you feel confident."
After a few seconds' discomfort, Morgan said, "Nah, kid, that's OK." He folded his tie and put it in his back pocket.
Reid reached backwards, snagged his own tie off the table, and handed it to Morgan. Derek gave him another you're-up-to-something look. Spencer, who was indeed up to something, but nothing to do with neckties, sat back again, head bowed, hands folded on his thighs. Morgan's brow furrowed. It was a long moment before he folded Reid's tie and stowed it away in his pocket with his own.
Morgan cleared his throat. "So when do we--"
Reid made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Just a few minutes," he replied. "May I help you with your shoes?"
Derek was looking more and more uncomfortable. The person he was expecting to act as a master seemed to be behaving more like a slave. "Um, OK," he said finally. He made no fuss at all as Reid removed Morgan's loafers and set them, side by side, beneath the coffee table.
Almost too easy.