Wild Nights, Wild Nights || s.reid

24. ...But Death Had Told Her So the First

You didn't go into work the day after that, either.

Instead, you alternated between lying in your bed and sitting on your couch, occasionally taking a bite or two from the cold Indian takeout you had in the fridge. It was from a new vegetarian restaurant in your neighborhood. You and Spencer had ordered an exorbitant amount earlier in the week and had eaten it while watching a filmed production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor on your TV. The food was delicious at the time.

Now, it didn't taste like much.

If you weren't trying to make yourself eat something, you were rereading your collection of Emily Dickinson poems over, and over, and over again. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you could hear your voice of rationality screaming at you to get up, to march into Boucher's office and demand to know why, to just do anything other than letting yourself wallow.

But there was a twisted comfort in the true hopelessness in which you hadn't indulged in a decade. That darkness was like a warm blanket surrounding you, weighing you down until you sank into the ground. And though you wished you were stronger than to revert back to this, you were so desperate for something familiar and known that you didn't have it in you to fight it away this time.

You were too tired to even try.

And at 8pm on the second night, you lied on your side on the very edge of your bed, as far away as you could be from the side that Spencer always slept on. His scent still lingered in parts of your apartment, but nowhere more than in your bed. You didn't have the energy to strip the sheets and wash them, so you just tried to ignore it as best you could.

It didn't work.

Your phone buzzed from its place on your nightstand, but you didn't check to see what it was; it was likely just another email about transfer logistics, or a confirmation that Hotch had received all the forms regarding your departure from the BAU. Instead, you had the bottom drawer of your nightstand open, and you were staring at the half filled bottle of vodka you kept stored there.

Throughout these past several weeks, you had somehow forgotten it was even there. There had just been so many other avenues of distraction, of balming that festering wound in you, that you hadn't really felt the need to drink it away.

Now, it looked like reprieve. A solution. An escape.

But when you swung your legs to dangle off the bed and sat up after swiping it out of the drawer, raising it to your lips, you sharply pulled it away with a gag at the mere scent of it. Its biting aroma burned the insides of your nose and throat, and when you finally blinked the tears away, you stared at the bottle with wide eyes.

That was a first, but considering the fact that you hadn't eaten anything substantial in two days, you shouldn't have been shocked. Had you even had water today?

You couldn't remember.

Before you could try to either get yourself to drink water or to just force the liquor down and hope for the best, your phone buzzed again, this time with an incoming call.

You turned your head to your nightstand and stared at your phone. The foolish part of you hoped it was Preston returning one of your seventeen calls, so when you finally gathered the energy to pick it up, you felt your heart sink at reading Garcia's name instead.

You didn't particularly want to talk to her, either. But when you let the call go to voicemail, she just called you back again immediately.

So you sighed and answered, "Hi, Garcia." Your voice was raspy and hoarse from two days of disuse.