Spencer Reid taught you how to ride a bike on your seventh birthday.
You can still feel the heat of the Nevada sun, his small hands gripping the back of the seat, your knees bruised from earlier attempts. The moment the bike steadied, your heart fluttered with something too big for a child to name.
“Don’t let go,” you whispered.
“I won’t,” he said — breathless, determined, soft.
That night, you blew out your birthday candles and made the first wish of many:
Let Spencer be mine someday.
You never stopped. Every birthday after. Every falling eyelash. Every shooting star.
Meanwhile, Spencer made wishes of his own. Not childish, not naïve — desperate. Quiet. Held tight in shaking palms.
Make me good enough for her someday.
But life didn’t bend for either of you.
He left for Caltech at eleven, too young, too brilliant, too far away. You wrote letters — dozens. Hundreds. He wrote back, then stopped, swallowed whole by his parents’ divorce, then MIT, then the world.
You studied abroad. He stayed on the East Coast. Both of you orbiting each other like two stars that could never quite align.
Parallel lines.
Close, but never touching.
Until Cambridge.
You walk into a Harvard lecture hall one chilly October afternoon, rubbing sleep from your eyes, pushing your hair behind your ear — and freeze.
Spencer Reid.
Older now. Taller. Hair longer, a little curlier. Cardigan sleeves pushed to his elbows. Hazel eyes sharper and softer all at once.
He’s the guest lecturer from MIT that day, scrawling something complicated across the board — until he sees you.
He stops mid-equation.
And the look on his face? Like a man who has just seen a ghost he spent half his life missing.
“Sorry,” he murmurs to the class, fingers tightening around his marker. “I—uh—lost my train of thought.”
You duck your head, pulse pounding. You stay after class, pretending to organize your notes. He approaches slowly, carefully, the way someone approaches a wild animal they don’t want to spook.
“Hi,” he says, voice softer than you remember.
“Hi, Spence.”
His breath catches. The nickname hits him right in the ribs.
“I didn’t know you were here,” he says. “Harvard. Cambridge.”
“I didn’t know you were here either.”
You try to smile. It wavers. He looks at you with so much aching familiarity your throat tightens.
“You look…” He stops. Tries again. “Good. You look good.”
“So do you.”
There’s a heavy, trembling silence between you — the weight of ten years of almosts.
Then he says your name, so gently it nearly undoes you.
“I missed you.”
Your heart cracks open. You swallow hard. “I missed you too.”
You don’t say:
I wished for you every birthday. Every year you were gone. Every time I rode a bike.
And he doesn’t say:
I wished for you on every star. Every lonely night. Every time I thought of home.
But the words sit between you, bright and fragile.
Spencer shifts his weight, hands in his pockets, cheeks tinged pink.
“Um,” he begins, awkward and sweet, “I was thinking… maybe we could catch up? Or—uh—get dinner? Sometime?”
Your breath catches, hope flaring painfully.
“I’d like that,” you say softly.
His smile is small but radiant — the kind he only ever wore with you.
Just like that, the orbit shifts.
Just like that, the friendship begins again.
And just like that, both of you pretend not to feel the pull of something deeper — something you’ve wished for since seven, something he’s wished for since he learned what longing was, something neither of you are brave enough to name.
Not yet.