Untouchable

Reckless

Sitting on the jet, Lydia was really feeling the fatigue set in. The whole team huddled as far away from her and Spencer as possible, trying to give them space to talk.

And that immediately set off alarms in her head.

She hadn't seen Spencer while she was hurting. Had something happened? She would have simply thought they wanted to let her rest, but they kept glancing over at her. Nervously.

"Hey. Honey...?"

She glanced at him, realizing that his thoughts were far from here and now.

"Spencer," she said more forcefully. "I need you to listen to me. What happened to me was not your fault. Okay? I made that choice."

"It's funny..." He still wasn't looking at her and suddenly Lydia realized she had yet to look at the wounds across her face. "Your dad actually said something to me when he was visiting."

Her eyebrows shot up. "My dad got you alone?"

"He said, 'Be careful with my daughter. I'm glad to see the two of you so happy, but in the end, Lydia's been untouchable since her mother died. You can't reach her. Not really.'"

The ache in her upper body disappeared, replaced by red, hot anger. "What an ass! He wants to rebuild our relationship so bad and then he-" She groaned. "He said basically the same thing to me. He was like 'a boyfriend doesn't seem like you. You're too closed off.' The hell does he know. He's been in prison for 7 years."

"He's right though."

"Excuse me?!"

For the first time in the whole flight, he looked her in the eyes. "I love you so much, Lydia. And I think you love me. But when it comes down to it, you don't trust me."

What the hell? "Of course I trust you-"

"I think it's partly my fault," he murmured. "I need to open myself up a bit more and show you how much I'd do for you. But that's a two way street, you know. If you close yourself off, I'll never get through to you. And I know how stubborn you are. You'll keep refusing to open up to me until you don't know anything else."

"Suddenly you believe my father more than me? I'm not hiding anything from you, Spencer!" She hated snapping at him, but her father was a sore subject for her. Always had been. The fact that Spencer had been hiding a conversation with him for months was scary to her. She didn't have faith in her father to look after her interests anymore.

"This is the second time you've done something dangerous without telling anyone and barely come out the other side! The shot you took in New York is barely healed and you're throwing yourselves at unsubs again, still unarmed and unvested. You act like this self-sacrificial stuff is the only way, but it's not. It's why we work in a team. You aren't talking to me."

He could have punched her in the gut, bruised abdomen and all, and it probably would have hurt less. Why were they still on different pages?

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

He simply shrugged, once again staring off into the distance. "I don't know how to fix this."

~ ~ ~

They barely talked for two days.

Lydia was once again in recovery mode, trying to rebuild some of the muscle in the stomach, but this event had set her back another couple of weeks in terms of bullet wound recovery. Ughhhh...

And her face was... purple, for starters. She was scared to leave the house in fear that kids would see her and scream. And it concerned her that the swelling wasn't going down, although she'd been told it wouldn't go away for at least a week. It felt unnatural for her face to be so... puffy.