A blaring alarm startles me awake. My heart surges in my chest and my eyes fly open. Beside me, a groan escapes Spencer's lips. One of his arms is on my chest, heavy weight holding me to the ground. Pinning me down. The alarm is beeping through the silence of the room, quiet with light flooding the room underneath the crack of the curtain.

I turn to look at Spencer who has eyes crewed tightly shut and a clenched brow.

"It's my..." he yawns, otherwise so quiet and still. I'm trapped beneath him. While he is thin, he feels so much heavier on me. "It's my work phone."

So, not an alarm. At least, not an alarm signalling our impending doom like I thought. No, it signals someone else's, someone far away who needs Reid's help. And the rest of the BAU. Our coworkers are probably being called in too. I can't move though. My body is tightly trapped beneath his grip.

"Spencer," I whisper his name.

He yawns again, pulling himself off me and beginning to sit up. The ringing stops midway through the gesture. He grunts, spine held in a stiff position. The floor has done him no good. I'm aware that my back hurts, somewhere in the disks that separate the bones in my spine, somewhere that there isn't as much adrenaline as the rest of me. My head is pounding. Then, I jump.

His phone starts to ring again.

He stands up, one hand on his lower back as he stumbles through the room. I doubt he's still drunk. I feel painfully coldly sober. Now, more than ever, I'm aware of what it means to be held down to the ground. The only places I've allowed myself to keep are on patches stitched to my favourite backpack. Now, I feel like I'm tacked to it as well. My body spread flat and sewn down, every nook of my skin aching with the sting of a needle pulled through it.

"It's Reid," he answers, his voice quiet. He presses his fingers to his forehead. "I'm almost three hours away right now. Can I..."

He stops talking. The room is quiet. I shift the lone blanket off me and look for my bag. It's right outside the bathroom. Then, I take the opportunity to run inside the bathroom. My hands wrap around the taps, blasting on the cold water, and then I throw it onto my face. The chill makes my whole head shake. I grab one of the folded hand towels and douse it with the water before bringing it up to my cheeks. I scrub my face, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. My head tingles with the same pain of a brain freeze. I pull back, stare at myself in the mirror.

The same girl looks back at me as the one yesterday. The same red hair, the same freckled and pink face, the same dewy wide look in my eyes. It's all different though. The look in my eyes. It's not about the way my eyes look but the way my eyes look back.

I reach a hand up. My finger trails the over the pink flesh of my lips. It looks no different. There is no proof anything has changed. No quantitative observations to be made about my body obviously, but maybe nothing even qualitative.

I kissed him.

Nevermind that I kissed someone for the first time since. I didn't even kiss Luc after all of it happened. Not even a kiss on my sister's cheek. Nevermind that though. I suppose in my wild days in Australia, the ones that sort of blur together, I know I must have, when I was black out drunk and woke up in the bed of someone who's body I remember but name I've forgotten. So, theoretically someone, but more like anyone. Nevermind that.

I didn't just kiss anyone. I kissed Dr. Spencer Reid, the man who sits across from me every day at work. Someone who works for the FBI, who I can't just disappear from, who is extraordinarily close with a group of people who make it their mission to find people.

There is a knock at the bathroom door.

I turn and open it.

Reid looks at me.

"We've got to go," he is cuffing a button-up that is wrinkled but at least not cock-eyed. "The jet is waiting for me."

"Shit," I manage. I'm still in my pajamas. "Shit."

"Hotch said I can miss it, but it's some big government case and-"

"Go," I tell him, nodding my head. "You guys don't need me."

"It's all hands-on deck," Spencer says. "Even Garcia is coming."

"Shit," I say again. I can't go. I can't get on a plane right now. Not if it isn't a plane out of the country. "Did JJ mention me?"

Reid pauses, one sleeve only just cuffed, but the sleeve is shorter than the other.

"No."

I nod. Maybe that would have hurt me last year when I was less secure, but more than anything I feel better. They aren't waiting for me. I'm not one of them. So, maybe, I can go somewhere else again.

I can stay in England for up to six months without a visa. That is something. That is a place to start. Maybe I can still accept my place at Malmö.

"Then just go," I tell him.

Reid starts to move again, hurrying back through the room to grab his stuff. He starts to pick up the blankets off the floor.

From the bathroom doorway, I shake my head, "I can clean up this mess. Stéphane can give me a ride back."

He turns his head to look at me, lips slightly parted. On his lips, I see it. A qualitative observation too. Maybe it's all in my head, but they seem plumper than they did yesterday. It was only one kiss. The one kiss over and over. Oh my God, are the other profilers going to see it on him?

"Don't..." I hesitate, gritting my teeth. I lean against my hands, pressing the weight of these words into the doorway.

"Tell the team," Reid finishes for me.

I can't even look at him. Surely, I'm scarlet now. Put that damn letter on me, since it might hide my shame better than I am.

God, I'm so fucking selfish. Once again, everything is about me. Fuck. I'm so up in my own bullshit that I'm hurting Spencer. Sure, he's a coworker, an intellectual, a rival, but he's more than that. He isn't even just a place that feels like home. He's a fucking person.

"I fucked up," I admit it. "I shouldn't have done that."

I wait for him to say something back, to retort. I don't even look at him as he leaves the room. His arm brushes mine, and I get a similar feeling again. The same one when I was lying beside him on the ground, pinned beneath him. Maybe I'm pinned to him. Fuck.

He heads out of the hotel door. I clean up the mess, as promised. I pick up the pillows and the blanket and I throw the little bottle of wine in the garbage bin. Even when the room is in order, with everything we put out of place where it's supposed to be, it doesn't feel clean. We didn't even sleep in the bed, and it feels wrong. I fluff the pillows again. Eventually though, I can't look at it anymore, so I text Stéphane and ask if he can give me a ride back, since Reid has to work.

Apparently, he has brunch plans, but he's more than happy to drive me home afterward,

With Caro and Cletus still in their bliss, I'm stuck with Stéphane and Bastien out leaning over a table of orange juice and toast. Stéphane is incredibly hungover and practically hunched over the table with sunglasses on indoors. Bastien drank way more, but he's fine. Likely because he's still such a baby. I'm the one who makes most of the conversation with Bastien, who tells wild stories about what him and some of the other groomsmen got up to after the party ended.

It's all a bit grotesque, but Stéphane seems to smile. He never partied in high school all that much, and he didn't go to college so I'm not surprised he doesn't have many fun stories to share.

"You hungover too?" Bastien asks, gesturing to my plate.

I'm not, but I can't eat the scrambled eggs on my plate. Just the sight of them makes me feel ill.

"No," I answer.

"Weird," Bastien answers. "See I thought it was an old age thing, but maybe Steph's just a bit of a loser."

Stéphane gives him the middle finger, and I laugh. The sound is so loud it startles me. My heart surges in my chest, and my sweater suddenly feels too tight around the neck. Like it's going to reach up and strangle me. As casually as I can, I excuse myself to the bathroom, and I splash more water on my face, but nothing seems to cure it. I don't think anything ever will.

~~~~~

Stop. Hold the phone. What do you think of what Cole has decided? Do you think it's fair? Let me know in the comments.