Hello! I wrote this little thing while listening to "Found Out About You" by the Gin Blossoms and "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak over and over again…I hope you like it!
I'm not sure how long I have been parked outside his apartment building. I don't know how many nights I've been coming out here. How many cups of coffee to keep me awake. 11 pm rolls around again. Somewhere in my mind I am aware of this, but it doesn't matter. There's no one at home waiting up for me. No one knows that I'm out here, presumably.
Janis Joplin once said that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and Jesus, was she right.
Like I said before, I don't know how long it's been since I started coming out here. It's strange, how when your heart is broken, everything becomes warped somehow. Time, and any acknowledgment of it, seems foolish. The minutes pass by slowly while everything around you seems to speed up. It's as if you are in a glass box where the clock ticks slowly, the minute hand crawling through a swamp. But outside of this box, the world rushes on, faster than ever. You can't help but take it personally when it seems the world is trying to leave you behind.
The thing is, I couldn't care less about the rest of the world. I never really needed their love or approval. But he is leaving me behind, caught up with the rest of them.
We were each other's first. I was his first lover, and he was the first lover that meant anything to me. My feelings for him terrified me at first, more than I would ever have admitted to him. It was always a push-pull. I couldn't stand to be away from him, but being near him drove me insane. It wasn't just lust, like I thought at first. Sexuality is complicated, I tried to tell myself when I first found myself having feelings for him. I thought it would fade. It hasn't.
The coffee burns my tongue, but I hardly notice. He isn't home yet. Is tonight one of the nights he spends away? The radio crackles in, crackles out.
I close my eyes and lean into the steering wheel. It's not fair. I never wanted this. At one point I accused him of seducing me just so he could break my heart. But I know that's not true. If it was, maybe I could move on. But he's a good person. Spencer Reid is the best person I've ever known, and he was mine for a little while.
I don't know when I first started to lose him. The beginning and end of our love affair was unclear. I think I always loved him, and when I let that rise from my subconscious was when I began to go insane.
For a while, I had done so well keeping him at bay. Hating him, even. Making him afraid of me at times. But it began to torment me. Every moment we were close, my body ached with a need to hold him. I sometimes found myself standing closer to him than necessary. I would brush against him, smell his hair, study his features. My eyes tracing his jawline, his lips. When he'd catch me looking I would stare for just a few seconds longer, to make him think I had nothing to be ashamed of. My staring had nothing to do with an interest in him. But, God help me, the shame was there, and it was eating me inside out.
I tried not to do it. I tried to get out of staying in the room with him. It wasn't a good idea, I tried to explain. But I couldn't let Morgan stay with him. How many nights had I laid in an unfamiliar, crisply made bed and tortured myself, seething with jealousy? With thoughts of them fucking. My brain formulated detailed images and sounds, a moving picture of their sexual longing for each other. Another night spent like that and I knew I would snap.
So I stayed with him. He seemed hurt by the way I had tried to get out of it, but he stayed quiet for a while. I had turned my back to let him crawl into his bed. It was horrible. I want to see you, my mind screamed. My fists clenched and I closed my eyes tight. I remember his voice. "Alright, Hotch, I'm decent."
The clock shifts and clicks into 12 am. Still no sign of him, and every second hurts more than I can ever remember hurting. But that's what I thought last night, I'm sure, and the night before, and many nights since I first let myself love Spencer Reid.
He had woken me up that night in the hotel. Something about a nightmare, or me talking in my sleep. But I had woken to find him sitting on the edge of my bed. I thought I was still dreaming when I kissed him. I knew I had to be dreaming when he kissed me back.
Movement on the sidewalk takes me back to tonight. My breathing stops. I can't move. When I see it's him, it makes me sick.
My lover, my friend, mine, he is walking hand in hand with someone else. Still him. It's still him he's with. Some low life, a parasite, who saw my beautiful boy and took him away from me.
Spencer Reid's voice in my head, telling me I couldn't love him the way he needed to be loved. Saying he hated the secrets, the way he had to lie about us, had to hide what we meant to each other. I see myself from far away, and I am silent and still. Saying nothing until he stands to leave. And I'm crying. Telling Spencer I love him, that our life together is the only good thing I have anymore.
"Then why do we have to keep it a secret? Why are you so afraid?" I remember he knelt down and took my hand in his. I kissed him. I begged him to let me be afraid, to let him be the only person to really know me. I couldn't understand his need for a public relationship. He was important to me, unlike anyone else. And I didn't need, or want, anyone else.
Is this what makes him happy, then? A pseudo connection with some punk who lets Reid hold his hand in public? How can this mean more to him than what we had?
He had tried to tell me about him once. Said he respected me too much not to tell me he'd found someone. It becomes a blur after that. I don't know how much of my screaming was in my head or how much of what he said was real. I've had dreams of that day many ties now, each time Spencer is crueler and crueler. I do know he met the parasite at one of his recovery meetings. I laughed when he told me that. I laughed until I cried. He looked terrified, he tried saying my name. In my nightmares I laugh until my ribs poke out of my sides and there is blood on my hands.
Sometimes my nightmares are simply memories. The night he woke me. The night we kissed for the first time. I'd pulled him into my bed. He'd pressed his body against mine and I'd felt the way he wanted me. We'd clung to each other, tearing at each other's clothes, panting and desperate. I told him I loved him. He was warm and tight around me, bringing me to euphoria. His groans were the sweetest sounds I had ever heard. I'll never get those sounds out of my head.
I'm sure that now he makes those sounds for the low life when he fucks him.
Spencer follows him around like a sick puppy. It disgusts me, because it reminds me of myself, of the way I'd loved Spencer. The way I love him.
I've tried to rationalize it. This punk with wild black hair, with sleeveless band tee shirts and tight jeans, how could he have taken Spencer away from me? Spencer, who was smart, who was overly analytical, awkward, he was more likely to get mugged by someone like the boy he was seeing. They weren't meant to fall in love. I had to suppose it was the attraction of two misfits. But Spencer didn't belong to this, whoever he was. This boy will never understand Spencer the way I do. He will never hold him with all the love that I had. Spencer will always be missing something. He could have been whole with me.
The minutes have ticked on. It could be another night by now, I don't know. My body is numb. The coffee is cold now as well as tasteless. The streets are empty. The steering wheel is cold, the gun in the passenger seat is cold.
They've gone inside by now. I catch a shadow by the window here and there, some sign of life. All of my life lies up there, with Spencer.
I stay long after the light goes out.