Wild Nights, Wild Nights || s.reid

21. Those Who Know Her, Know Her Less

Spencer had already been awake for fifteen minutes when your alarm went off. The sun was just starting to rise, and warm gray light filtered in through your curtains, just barely illuminating the space. He could hear gusts blowing by outside. If he looked out the window, Spencer knew that he would be met with dreary gray clouds indicative of an impending storm and trees shaking violently in the winds.

He hated the way he felt after waking up, often plagued by the lack of saliva flow in his mouth at night that let the naturally-occuring bacteria there flourish and the buildup of sebum on his face that made him feel greasy. Were he at home, he would have gone about his usual routine, which meant immediately brushing his teeth and hopping into a cool shower.

But he had refused to move, afraid of drawing you from your slumber.

Spencer was lying on his left side, and his arms were wrapped tightly around you—his left arm wrapped around your shoulders as your head rested on the junction between his arm and chest, and his right arm wrapped around your waist. You had a leg hiked over his hip, and your left arm held him close to you, like you were afraid to be alone even in sleep.

He knew the feeling.

But when you had shot up in bed in the middle of the night, breathing so hard that it sounded like every inhale shredded your lungs with glass and trembling so violently that he could feel the mattress shaking beneath him, his brain had shut off for a few seconds. He hadn't the faintest clue what to do or how to help; he hadn't even known what was happening. And then he'd caught a glimpse of your face before you turned your back to him completely, and he'd frozen completely.

He'd seen fear in every form throughout his career at the FBI. He'd experienced fear himself in far too many forms throughout his life. But none of his experiences could have prepared him for that look on your face.

That was a look of true terror—with glazed over eyes that indicated that you had been transported to a past horror.

But when you had laid your head between your knees and interlocked your fingers behind your neck, hiding away like a child would, while playing comforting music and reciting what he assumed to be familiar street names, for half an hour, he finally understood.

And when you'd refused to meet his eyes afterwards and instead cast your gaze down towards the sheets, your face twisting with embarrassment, he'd felt his heart break. He was familiar with the shame that accompanied disorder; he'd felt it in his own way many years ago, and truthfully, still felt it when he looked back on that time in his life. It was one thing to feel that shame himself and half heartedly tell himself that struggling and disorder were nothing to be ashamed of, and quite another to see a person he loved experience that same shame.

Neither mental injury nor disorder was anything to be ashamed of, and he knew that you knew that. But believing it for oneself was always more difficult than convincing similarly-afflicted-others of it and was far more easily said than believed.

He was eternally grateful that you had turned to him for whatever little comfort he could offer you, though. That you had not built a wall when he handed you the final piece of the bridge he'd built between you. He should have been satisfied with just that, with knowing that he was now trusted enough to be privy to this side of you, but he couldn't be.

Spencer could not stop his mind from trying desperately to figure out what had happened to you to develop such a diagnosis.

His hypothesizing was cut short when the alarm on your phone went off.

You gasped and bolted to a seated position, wrenching your body from his arms and going rigid.

Spencer sat up with you as you reached over to your nightstand to shut off your alarm. Then you sighed and stared ahead of you. You blinked a few times, but your eyes remained empty.