Spencer Reid | Girl Crush

Spencer Reid had always been good at noticing patterns, especially the small ones that other people dismissed as noise. He noticed how pens went missing from his desk and reappeared in Garcia's hands an hour later. He noticed the way Hotch's jaw tightened by a precise and repeatable fraction whenever paperwork piled too high, noticed how trauma altered speech cadence, posture and breathing, even when the person insisted they were fine.

What he was far less skilled at noticing was himself, or rather, he noticed himself too much in the wrong ways. Spencer catalogued his own awkward pauses and the tendency to overexplain. He registered how his hands never quite knew where to rest when he was standing still. Those observations crowded out subtler truths, the ones that required emotional fluency instead of data, the ones that did not announce themselves as problems until they had already taken root.

The realization began quietly during a briefing, in a way that almost escaped his notice entirely. JJ laughed at something Morgan said, not loudly or carelessly, but with a brief warmth that seemed to soften the edges of the room. Spencer's attention derailed completely. His mind attempted to compensate by offering facts about laughter as a social bonding mechanism and the neurological pathways involved, but none of that explained the sudden lightness in his chest or the way his pulse picked up speed.

He looked at her for half a second too long. JJ caught his eye, smiled, and looked away again without attaching any particular meaning to it. That was the problem, even if Spencer did not have the language for it yet. He attached meaning anyway, filling the silence she left behind with implication and possibility.

After that, the pattern grew more visible, at least in hindsight. He noticed how he sat up straighter when JJ addressed him directly, how he rehearsed answers in his head when she looked as if she might ask a question. Disappointment landed harder than it should have when she left the bullpen early or paired off with Morgan instead of him. He told himself this was normal, statistically common in high stress group environments, and likely to pass on its own.

Then there was {{user}}.

{{user}} was often nearby, not always close, but consistently present in the periphery of Spencer's awareness. He did not consciously register this at first. It existed as a vague sense of gravity, a quiet attentiveness that didn't demand space but occupied it all the same. He noticed that {{user}} listened to him without the polite impatience he had learned to expect from most people, and that questions came without an edge, motivated by genuine curiosity rather than challenge.

He did not assign significance to that either; he was very good at overlooking kindness when it didn't announce itself loudly.

What Spencer did begin to notice, slowly and with some confusion, was the way {{user}} changed whenever JJ entered the room. It was subtle enough that he nearly missed it, which felt ironic given his reputation. There was a tightening, a withdrawal so slight it registered more as absence than action. When JJ spoke to Spencer, {{user}}'s attention drifted elsewhere. When JJ laughed, {{user}} did not.

Spencer explained this away at first. Fatigue, perhaps, or distraction. His mind supplied a list of neutral hypotheses, and he accepted the one that required the least emotional engagement. He was very good at that too.

The jealousy took longer to name. It arrived in fragments rather than a complete picture, sharp flashes that made his stomach twist before he understood why. There was something brittle in the air when JJ leaned against his desk, close enough that he could smell her perfume. There was a strange tension when Morgan teased him later, grinning openly and nudging JJ with his elbow. "Careful, Reid," Morgan had mentioned, amused. "You keep looking at her like that and people are gonna talk."

JJ had rolled her eyes, smiling. "Please. He looks at crossword puzzles with the same intensity."

Spencer had laughed too loudly, heat flooding his ears as he fumbled for a response. Across the room, {{user}} had gone very still, and Spencer hadn't understood why that unsettled him so deeply at the time.

The realization came days later, uninvited and unwelcome. Spencer caught {{user}} watching JJ with an expression that looked uncomfortably familiar, not desire exactly, but something sharper and more restrained. It took him a moment to recognize it for what it was, and when the word jealousy finally surfaced, it did so with unpleasant precision.

A drop of guilt settled cold in his stomach. He hadn't done anything wrong, not technically. JJ was not his, and he hadn't spoken a word about his feelings aloud. He had barely admitted them to himself. Still, the guilt persisted, because patterns didn't exist in isolation. They overlapped, influenced each other, caused collateral damage.

Once he saw it, he could not unsee it. He noticed how {{user}} flinched almost imperceptibly when JJ complimented him, how {{user}}'s mouth tightened when JJ touched his arm in passing. On days when JJ was particularly bright and effortless, the air around {{user}} felt heavier, as if something unspoken weighed it down.

Spencer's mind, cruel in its thoroughness, supplied comparisons he didn't want. JJ was prettier. JJ was funnier. JJ navigated social spaces with an ease Spencer had never possessed. He knew from experience how intoxicating that kind of confidence could be from the outside, how easy it was to measure oneself against it and come up lacking.

It didn't occur to him that the comparison itself was unfair, it also ddn't occur to him that {{user}} might be fighting an entirely different internal battle. What did occur to him, obsessively, was the possibility that he was hurting {{user}} without meaning to, and that thought unsettled him more than the crush ever had.

JJ remained oblivious, or perhaps simply uninterested. She treated Spencer with the same affectionate professionalism she always had, warm and encouraging but carefully bounded. She didn't flirt or linger, and when his sentences spiraled into anxious tangents, she listened patiently before steering him back on track. It was kindness, not invitation, and Spencer knew that intellectually even as the feelings persisted anyway.

One evening, paperwork stretched late into quiet hours. The bullpen emptied until only a handful of desks remained occupied. JJ packed up, slung her bag over her shoulder, and offered him a familiar smile. "Good night, Spence," she called. "Don't stay too late."

Spencer nodded and attempted a response, words tumbling over themselves. "Statistically speaking, the probability of diminished cognitive performance increases significantly after prolonged wakefulness, so that would be advisable."

She grinned, indulgent. "See. You've got it covered."

When she left, the room felt distinctly quieter. Spencer looked up without quite intending to and found {{user}} still there, watching him in a way that JJ never did. There was no easy warmth in it, only something unresolved and carefully contained, something that made his chest tighten in response.

He wanted to say something, to explain or apologize or confess something he hadn't yet found the words for. Instead, he gathered his papers with unnecessary precision, heart beating too fast for a man who had not moved. After a long moment, he cleared his throat and spoke, his voice tentative and unsure. "Hey... Can I ask you something?"