she's got you mesmerized

only if you knew

content warnings: description of a panic attack, mentions of bullying and homophobia, swearing

a/n: this story is rated mature, and was written with an adult audience in mind. if you are a minor, please do not interact with this work. thank you!

Spencer isn't looking for a relationship when he meets you. He wants a relationship someday, but he likes his life the way it is for now. He doesn't want it to change yet. He thinks that's why it took him so long to realize he was in love with you.

You join the team a few weeks after Rossi does. Hotch has been wanting to add another profiler to the unit for a while. The fiasco with Gideon's loss of Sarah and subsequent disappearance, then Emily's sudden resignation, finally convinces the board that it might not be a bad idea to have more than five profilers on the team.

Morgan and Hotch already know you. You come from the sex crimes unit, and the BAU had worked a case with them a month before he joined. You were just an agent trainee at the time, but Hotch saw promise in you, and has kept an eye on your work ever since. (Spencer wonders how he never ran into you at the academy; you're only a year older than him and you both joined the Bureau in 2003. Eventually he realizes it's because you weren't remediated.)

Despite an awkward introduction (he gives you his spiel about handshakes and how it's safer to kiss, and you respond with, well, if you insist, prompting laughter from Morgan and Prentiss, and leaving him at a loss for words as his face turns red), you quickly become friends. Your mutual love of reading is how you initially connect. Then he notices you only ever cut off his infodumping when you're working on a case, and it's always with a gentle, "redirect, Spence." Outside of work, you seem genuinely interested in what he has to say, even going so far as to follow up on things you had to interrupt earlier.

You also bond over your shared love of Doctor Who, and begin to join him at Penelope's place each time a new episode airs. It's not long before he considers you his best friend.

Spencer tells you things he rarely puts a voice to. He tells you about his kidnapping and subsequent Dilaudid problem (he still struggles to call it what he knows it was—an addiction) after the South Padre Island case, when he doesn't pick up on Adam's dissociative identity disorder until it's just a bit too late.

On the one year anniversary of his solving of the Riley Jenkins case, he recounts what happened the day his dad left in a wavering voice and you run your hand up and down his back when he cries.

He even tells you about the goalpost incident and the real motivation behind that act of bullying, a detail he omitted when he told Morgan about it. (He didn't have a crush on Alexa Lisben, the prettiest girl in school. He had a poorly concealed crush on the football team's quarterback.)

You also open up to him in a way you seldom do to anyone. You tell him about the bullying you experienced in high school over your shared sexuality. You tell him about the worst cases you saw in the sex crimes unit, and on a day when you're struggling, you tell him what the worst day of your life was.

He's had great friends before, and still does, but he's never had one quite like you.

Spencer can't say what the moment he fell in love with you was. He can't pinpoint when your friendship became something more to him. But he knows the moment he realized he was in love, and he doesn't need an eidetic memory to recall it perfectly.

It's such a small thing, nothing big and grand like film and literature portray. He's showed up to the roundtable with a new haircut. Hotch asks him if he's joined a boyband, which he doesn't quite get, but Morgan finds very amusing. You catch up to him on his way out of the bullpen and say, "I liked your hair long, but it looks great like this, too."