Chapter forty-one
BAU Headquarters
FBI building
Quantico, VA

Spencer

"You know you're on my syllabus for tonight." Blake said, gently. "You do remember?"

Spencer stopped. He'd finished his paperwork on the plane, and was currently nearly running out the door to meet Susanna. He'd agreed to that lecture months ago, before he even met her and now….

"Oh! You and those puppy dog eyes." Blake shook her head. "Okay, I'll swap with you but you have to come through next week."

"Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!" With that he was flying out the door again.

North Cleveland Park
Washington DC

Susanna was waiting out on the front steps when he pulled up. "Spencer?" She asked as he got out of the car.

"Yes."

She reached out to him, taking his hand and then pulling him into her arms, something he did not resist. "I'm glad you came back." She said to the crook of his neck.

"I'm glad you asked me."

"I'm sorry I got so upset the other day. Meeting Kavi was amazing, thank you for that."

"You're welcome. I was just worried about you. What happened?"

She looked back at the house a moment. "Walk with me?"

The house was located in a quiet, residential neighborhood, a good area to quietly walk and talk. "Please tell me no one hurt you." He said gently. He would work with it if someone had, but he might have to find them and hurt them, severely.

"What?" She looked surprised by that. "Oh! No. No, not at all. No, it's that…" She sighed. "This isn't going to be easy, is it?"

"Take your time." She still wanted him around, they were talking, she could take all the time in the world. They could walk all over Washington, he wouldn't mind.

She tried. She did. She made a few false starts, but soon enough found a starting point. "You have to understand what Marsha's been calling purity culture." She said. "It's not just about waiting until you're married."

"I figured, based on some of the things you've talked about, and they've threatened about, that it goes considerably further than that."

"It does. It's not just the physical, although that is a big part of it. Waiting until you're married is common to all religions but in purity culture it takes it to the point of not touching at all before marriage, even saving your first kiss for the altar. It's not even about the emotional aspect, although that's a bigger part of it as well."

"Emotional aspect?"

"Purity culture teaches that every time you enter into a relationship with someone you give them a piece of your heart. When you break it off with them you lose part of yourself, something breaks inside of you that can never be mended. Because of that you're taught to carefully shepherd your heart, to not allow yourself to feel anything for anyone until after the wedding. But there's also the…oh, I guess you could call it the intellectual aspect as well. In the purity culture every…sexual experience you have takes something away from your future spouse. Every experience, even if no other human being is involved. Even an arousing thought or fantasy or a boy at night in his dreams, all of it is the sin of adultery."

"That's why they didn't let any of you stay alone for more than five minutes." Spencer nodded. "I remember."

"Mamma said she'd tell us how babies were made the night before we married, there was no need to learn before. All we needed to know was that when we were married and right with God he'd start planting babies in our bellies. We'd know it was happening because the sign of Eve's curse would go away." She chuckled a little. "Thankfully I learned a little more from listening to the radio and from that odd bundle of books that came in over the past few years, but not much more."

"Not much more?"

"Not as much as I learned from Kavi." The hard part was not laughing here. But walking arm in arm meant she could feel it. "You're laughing, aren't you?"

"I'm really trying not to." Oh good heavens. His first experience had been almost getting to first base with Lila Archer in her pool. Her first had been getting to third base with a Sumatran tiger. But knowing that he understood why she had pushed him away. Hadn't he pushed Lila away in response to the sudden shocking intensity of it all?

"Oh! I always felt so guilty about what I was learning, I knew that if anyone found out they would cut me off from the books and my radio and then I'd have nothing to do but sit in my room all day and wait to die. I knew I was doing something so very wrong, that there was something wrong with me, something twisted that I was interested at all. But at the same time I was so very curious about it all. I veered between hoping somehow someone would magically show up in my room and care enough to overcome his anger that I had been cheating on him all that time and then letting me learn…" She turned bright rose in the cheeks just then. "And giving up and living a life without anyone. I just kept trying to shut everything down and approach it from an unemotional, intellectual point-of-view, thinking that if I could learn about…that without actually feeling anything then I wasn't doing anything so very wrong. And I succeeded, nothing ever dropped below my ears….until I met Kavi."

"That sounds familiar?" Spencer said

"It does?" Susanna cocked her head, curious.

He patted the hand she had wrapped around his bicep to calm her. "I have a confession to make. You're not the only one new at this."

"Oh?"

"Granted, I didn't shut down because God or a pastor told me to. I shut down because my growing into my sexuality aggravated my mother's illness, and because it goaded my peers on to ever more cruel bullying behavior, and because the university I attended was responsible for me and so didn't allow me any real chance to get to know girls. By the time my mother was safely housed and the bullies were left behind and I no longer needed a chaperone from the university I had my first PhD and was teaching and could no longer date students my own age. I just shut everything down…"

"…convinced yourself that it wasn't something you needed…"

"…that I was completely asexual, yes. Until Lila pulled me into her pool. My version of meeting Kavi."

She gave him a small, almost knowing smile. "Kind of a shock to the system, isn't it?"

His ears immediately caught fire. That first ever hot rush of desire. "I'll say." He agreed. It was a secret, he thought, experiencing that when you were old enough to appreciate it. A secret he could finally share.

But then she had to ask the one thing he was almost hoping she wouldn't. "What about Maeve?"

Oh. "She died before we had the chance to really see if we felt that way. I mean, she wanted to, she'd been engaged before and had vastly more experience…sometimes it was a little intimidating, to be honest."

"I can see that."

"The thing is…the woman who killed her…Diane…she wanted to take everything from Maeve at the end…she got a lot…uhhh…a lot closer than I wanted…"

Susanna squeezed his arm tighter. "Oh, I am so sorry."

Spencer took a deep breath. "So you have guilt and I have a lot of…okay fear about the whole thing. And we have roughly the same amount of experience. I'm not certain that intellectual knowledge counts for much here."

"So we're starting from the same place."

"More or less," he stopped for a moment. "I assume now we need to talk about what happens next, would you like to go get some dinner while we talk about it?"

"Yes."