Chapter Text
Reid got home and called for Cat, setting his keys in the tray beside the door. He was exhausted; coming home in the early hours of the morning after working all night was once again taking its toll on him.
Cat's schedule wasn't much better, and he wasn't surprised when she didn't answer, and he found her sound asleep in their bed instead. He planned to grab a bite, and then unwind and cuddle up to her, at least until her alarm roused her, and she had to slither out of bed again and back to work.
Both him and Cat worked long, irregular shifts as of late, and would miss each other on their way out more than spending any time together. Both of them preferred their bed for sleeping these days, and mostly found time to have sex only when they'd run into each other in the shower.
It was grueling, but it was what life was like with them having the careers they did. He was still with the BAU and she worked for the Interpol -- which was the agency that expressed an independent interest in employing her as an asset, and a full-fledged employee later on. This was how she got off death row, and how she found her way back into his life. As if anything else could have been possible.
They got married a year ago, two years on the dot since the first time they reestablished contact. He can't lie -- he didn't know that this would be happening, and she didn't have the courtesy to put it in writing first. She only showed like an apparition, dressed like a siren in the bar where she knew he would run into her. And the rest was history.
Her phone kept buzzing on the table, next to her open purse. Reid glanced at it, and couldn't recognize the number, which meant that it wasn't her boss, and wasn't anyone from her team.
He moved to look back at her through the open doors of the bedroom; she must have been exhausted from work, and looked very peaceful and cute now, sleeping, passed out in their bed. Still, the phone kept ringing. Reid answered it.
---
When she wakes up by herself, he's grateful that she did because he was about to have to go to bed as well, and he wanted a chance to talk to her and kiss her before he did.
So he does. He holds her, and he plants a kiss on her lips, then smooths back the few curled strands that fell in her face.
"You got a call from your doctor's office while you were asleep. I picked up. They said you recently had an appointment and seem to have left your jacket and your keys there."
If that wasn't peculiar enough by itself, her reaction cemented it. He could see it happen on her face, as she thought about whether to tell him the truth, some half truth, or flat out lie and distract him from this.
"And yet I wondered where that had gone," she replied, trying to inject some levity in this, but he wasn't falling for it.
"What's going on, Cat? You have been weird and distracted for weeks now, and now this random doctor's appointment? I haven't seen you lose and look for your keys in your life."
"Nothing," she says, stonewalling him, shrugging it off. "It's nothing....it was just a routine doctor's appointment. I should just stop by, and pick up my things I guess."
He was correct. This was something to get concerned over.
"Don't worry about it. It's nothing. It's fine." She shrugged him off and tried to walk off, but he stopped her.
"Cat, it can't possibly be nothing. Tell me." Now he was growing concerned. Was she fine? Why all the stress around it and the secrecy?
"You understand that I'm gonna walk around half convinced that you are dying with how you're going about this? Just tell me whatever it is; it can't be worse than that."
"Okay, fine. I'll tell you." She briefly pauses, and inhales and exhales. "I was pregnant, and now I'm not, and that's all there is to it."
She was pregnant?
Are you saying that you had a miscarriage?" He was baffled; how could that have possibly happened without him noticing anything? And why wouldn't she tell him?
"No. I'm just saying that I....was pregnant." She rummaged through her bag, and dug out what Reid immediately recognized as a pregnancy test. It was positive.
He finally pieces it together. She was pregnant and she had an abortion and she didn't mention any of that to him.
"You were pregnant, Cat? For how long did you know that you were pregnant?"
"I don't know," she shrugs defensively. "A couple of weeks."
He was pretty sure she knew exactly, and she just didn't want to tell him. "Okay. And why didn't you tell me anything?" he presses further.
She's uncomfortable. There's something about it....she's too good of an actress for this to mean nothing but to cause cracks in her mask.
She folds her arms under her chest. "I don't know. I guess I didn't think it mattered. We were both busy, and I thought it would be easier if I just took care of it myself. We talked about it before, remember? We said that we weren't ready."
She's lying. About the she didn't think it mattered part. She did think it mattered, that's the entire reason she lied.
"You didn't think it mattered, Cat? How could it possibly not matter?"
He's not yelling at her, but he's exasperated, and he feels if she lies to him again he might start yelling soon.
They did talk about it. That's not the issue. He doesn't have a problem with her having an abortion if she didnt want to be pregnant, he has a problem with the fact she's everything but honest with him.
"So it didn't matter, and the obvious course of action was to lie?"
"I didn't lie to you," she corrects him. "I failed to tell you something, maybe, but I didn't lie."
"Same difference." Reid argues. "It's obviously something a normal person would mention. You knew that it was a relevant thing to omit."
"But it wasn't, was it? It wouldn't be, and I knew it wouldn't be, so that's why I didn't say anything. You weren't supposed to find out."
Reids brows shot up. "Is that your defense?"
"I'm saying I don't need a defense. It's my....thing. It was none of your business."
"None of my business?" he says, outraged. "I'm sorry Cat, did I pass out and start hallucinating that I'm sleeping with you?
"And so what if you are?" she bites back. "Like i said, it didn't matter. It wouldn't matter. I didn't tell you to spare you."
"Spare me? Spare me what? I can tell you what you didn't spare me, maybe the pain and betrayal of my wife lying to me?"
"Spencie," she tries to deescalate, she wants to touch him but he pulls away.
"No. You can't Spencie your way out of this one. It's over, I'm done with this, I'm just....done." He grabs the keys on his way out and walks out.
---
Somehow he ends up at a bar. He's not a drinker usually but his head is too loud, and if he goes somewhere even louder maybe all the voices in his head might stop.
It's not that Reid wants children, and she's ambivalent at best. He's told her a long time ago she's the only thing that actually matters in his life, everything else is window dressing. He can love other people, he can love his mother, he can love his friends, he could love his child, but he needs her: she's a part of him and the one thing he categorically refuses to live without. It's not that she can worry he would react wrong. They had this conversation before, after all, and he never did.
If she wanted an abortion, she just needed to say so, and he would drive her without a flinch, because being overprotective of her overrode just about any other impulse he ever could have had. If being pregnant was hurting her, he would never want her to do it or try to pressure her to have it. Especially since it had been her, and he understood. He understood her fears about her genetics, he understood her worries about how attachment does or would work in her case, he understood her as a person and that she simply did not have the average emotional bandwidth when it came to certain things. He didn't resent any of it, he loved her in her entirety, her idiosyncrasies and all.
But there was one thing. They told each other they would be honest with each other. When they got down to it, she was afraid that he did not love her as she wanted him to, or that he would stop loving her, no matter how much he tried and did prove to her over and over that wasn't true, and he was afraid....of her. She was capable of many things, after all. She could choose, she did choose not to do them, but she was capable of them nevertheless. And Reid had paranoid tendencies. And when those two factors overlapped, well.
So they made a pact. She wouldn't give into her distrust of his love for her, not without giving him a chance to argue for it first. And she would not lie to him and scare him by hiding things and managing his perceptions and triggering his paranoia. And it worked, for the most part...at least he thought that it did. It worked until it didn't.
He would forgive her for just about anything. But he couldn't stand the idea of lies and deceit between them after all this time. Everything about this was one step forward, two steps back. It was hopeless. She would never trust him, so he should never trust her.
There had to be a deeper reason she was lying about it. He doesn't trust anything that comes from his brainstorming at this point, because he's in unfalsifiable paranoid territory. None of those things are likely, but they're possible, and he doesn't know.
She played it off like her private thing, like she wasn't his, like the baby wouldn't be his too. Maybe it's bold of him to assume it would be. He just about wants to down a tripple shot to that.
Reid takes his wedding ring, and spins it on the surface of the bar. It spins off and falls towards the ground, but he catches it, and for whatever reason puts it in his pocket.
He sits at the bar so that the bartender is right there, and a woman, roughly his age he thinks, comes and sits beside him. He assumes anyone doing this at this hour has their own cliched but personal reason why. He's not in a mood for chatter, but he falls into a habit of short vague responses to her trivial vague questions.
It strikes him how unlike Cat she was in every way. He probably lacks filter with being so drunk, but she's blonde and she's a moron, and no those two qualities aren't linked. She's just dumb and bright, not because she made a meaningful choice to be like that, but because she doesn't know how to be anything else. It's strangely relaxing, because he just about wishes he could amputate his own brain.
She's pretty, but more in a way he'd assume that other men react to her rather than thinking that according to his taste.
At first, he doesn't know what it was about it, about her that made him do it. Then he realized. He'd been giving her fuck off signals for about the last 2.5 hours and she just....doesn't mind, doesn't care. It doesn't factor in at all. If there was such a thing as unconditional love, this is unconditional horniness. It's the unconditional part he cares about-- there was no walking on eggshells here. He could step on them and break them and no one would care. He's tired of multiple nested conditions, he's tired of dark complexity, he needs a break from driving himself crazy and paranoid and breaking his own heart even when Cat wasn't there to do it. This woman was too dumb to break anyone's heart.
She's much less drunk than him. She's flirting with him. She's trying to take him home.
In the end Reid lets her.