3 [Spencer Reid x Reader]

Choke

You were being driven up the wall. Stir-crazy wouldn't even begin to describe how restless you had gotten over the next few days. They had only given you boring, outdated books to keep you busy. No tv, no phone, no puzzles, no board games. There were only so many things that could keep your interest for so long. Your mind kept replaying the scene of you and Emily in the bathroom, you and Spencer on the bed.

The team members switched places, usually in the middle of the night or early in the morning, so you always woke up to a new person in the house. David had come after Emily, and Derek after him. Both had been polite, albeit a bit cold, but gentlemanly all the same. David had tried to make pleasant conversation, though you saw straight through his friendly exterior. He was just trying to get information from you. Derek was the same, though he didn't hide it at all. He would interrupt the silence to ask you questions, some personal, some not, but still annoying.

You wondered if Aaron or Jennifer would visit next. You had figured out through news articles and interviews from before all of this that both of them had children, so perhaps they wanted to stay with their families as much as they could. It made sense that they would wait to visit you after spending so much time away from home initially. So it was that much more of a surprise the next morning when you saw Spencer sitting on the couch rather than Aaron or Jennifer.

He refused to look at you as you shuffled into the kitchen for some kind of food. You were grateful that they at least allowed you to roam without cuffs on in the house. They had likely deduced that you weren't suicidal enough to kill yourself because you would have done so already, and you had already proven that you didn't want any of them to die either. Their only job right at the moment was to protect you.

It had started with him changing your bandages. There was tension there, not as much as there had been with Emily, but still enough for you to notice. Spencer still refused to even speak to you, and it was driving you crazy. When he had finished bandaging you up and stood to leave, you grabbed his hand in yours softly.

"Thank you, Doctor."

His eyes met yours for the first time that day. He nodded once and then left you alone without another glance. As you had been unwilling to engage days ago, he was now closing himself off from you. You hadn't even been able to thank him for the other night. For some reason, the thought of acknowledging it at all made your stomach flip, but you knew it was something you needed to do. You met him in the living room again, this time sitting on the opposite side of the couch from him. You took a moment to study his unruly hair, his strong hands. His nose was so buried in his book that you suspected he was faking his interest.

"Doctor?"

You knew he liked it when you called him that. He looked over at you slowly, as if he were dreading to speak to you. Your mouth was already dry thinking about having to talk to him about this.

"Yes?"

"I wanted to say thank you for the other night. I really appreciated it."

He pursed his lips together for a moment before answering.

"Don't mention it."

"No, really, I-"

"It's fine. Really," he interrupted, turning back to his book. It shouldn't have hurt your feelings as much as it did, that he had shrugged you off so nonchalantly. Your mind told you to let it go. He had done you a favor, and that was that. Now, he was giving you an out so that you didn't have to talk about it. But it was as if he wasn't even accepting your thankfulness, brushing you off as a burden. That wasn't how he felt, or at least you hoped it wasn't, but you couldn't think of anything else to say.