Title: First Instinct
Author: ailei
Rating: Somewhere between FRM and FRAO, but I can't quite place it.
Pairing: Lila/Spencer, Gideon/Spencer
Warnings: Ehh, moderately explicit het? Some naughty words? For me, this is the tamest of the tame.
Spoilers: If you don't have any idea who Lila is, then yes, this is one big spoiler for 'Somebody's Watching'.
Summary: Always go with your first instinct.
Notes: Thanks to my betas luckychance and hopeowl, and thanks to Hope for putting this in my head to begin with. Yes, there will very probably be a sequel. No, I'm not trying to be mean.

***

This wasn't right. Oh god, it wasn't. Spencer shuddered, eyes squeezed tightly shut against the image of Lila's eyes, her long hair, her breasts swaying as she rose and fell atop him, moaning. Her nails dug into his chest, and she just kept murmuring encouragements. Ooh, baby, yeah. Fuck me, yes. You feel so good, gonna make me come. Make me come for you. Only Spencer didn't know. Didn't know how to do this, to do anything, no matter how many books he'd read.

He had no instinct for this, no feel for it, and he wasn't doing any of the work anyway. She'd just climbed on and impaled herself, taking this, feeling she'd done quite the good deed in divesting a shy, awkward geek of his much-hated virginity.

"Oh, come on," Lila had murmured, eyes sly and knowing as she'd unzipped his pants and reached inside with a small, soft hand. "All boys want to get their dicks wet. I'm just glad I got to this one first and can show you a really nice time. You can just relax."

Spencer was sure that he wanted a great deal more than that. But Morgan was right, wasn't he? A continent between them, and two very demanding jobs. This was what they could have, and if he squinted at it, cocked his head and put on his Morgan-glasses, maybe, just maybe, he could wrap his mind around it and call it good enough.

Lila cried out sharply above him, lithe back arching, and Spencer's eyes flew open. The contractions around his buried cock dragged him right over the edge, but he wasn't prepared for how much it ached. He felt...wrong. Baddirtywrong, and suddenly it all came into focus, his mind processing everything in one instant and forming a pattern that hit him in the gut harder than a steel-toed boot.

Those little hands were too dainty, the curves too pronounced, the wet heat too slick. Her voice in his ear wasn't a low vibrato murmur, and her eyes weren't nearly dark enough, not even when they were dilated with arousal. It was too easy, and at the same time impossibly difficult. Spencer needed this to *matter*. He needed her to understand why it mattered, and why it couldn't ever happen again.

But it did happen again, and again over the course of that long weekend, and over and over Spencer looked inside for words that wouldn't come. He wasn't in the habit of profiling friends, but her utterly cavalier attitude about sex made him wonder how many men had used her, and he knew he couldn't be just another GUY who treated her like an object, even though she'd pushed for the sex. Pushed hard, over his objections, over his inclinations. Spencer wasn't in the habit of blaming others for his own failings, either. He could have said no.

By the time Spencer put Lila on the plane back to Los Angeles Sunday evening, his skin crawled. A long shower left his pale flesh pinked and raw, and before he'd even consciously thought about what he was doing, he had all his sheets and blankets in the wash.

He wandered into the bullpen the next day, bumping into a chair, a filing cabinet, and a trash can on the way to his desk, and only the fact that he'd beaten nearly everyone in saved him from a round of teasing that he really didn't feel up to at the moment.

After a few minutes of trying to focus his thoughts on the case file in front of him, Spencer opened his desk drawer and looked at his magazine collection, eyeing the tawdry covers before taking them straight to the paper shredder. He watched, fixated and fascinated, as he fed each one through, reducing them one by one to colorful confetti in the bin. Just to be sure, positive, he reached down and mixed up the scraps.

"Your weekend wasn't all you'd hoped." A quiet voice startled him, and Spencer turned to Gideon with his heart in his throat. "Your weekend with Lila." As if Gideon had needed to clarify.

"Of c...course it was, Gideon. It was all anyone could hope for, really." Spencer cringed inwardly at how wishy-washy that had sounded.

"I'd like to talk to you in private, Spencer. Let's go to my office." Gideon spared him the indignity of outright calling bullshit on him, but Spencer still felt like a naughty puppy lagging along behind its master upon being discovered chewing on a table leg.

Ooh. Nooo, that's not a good place to go, Spencer. Not at all.

"I'm fine, Gideon, really," Spencer rushed to say the instant the door was shut.

"Don't lie to me, Spencer." Gideon sat on the edge of his desk. "Something is very wrong, and I think I know what it is."

Oh god. "No, it's not what you think, really, I swear, I would never..." Spencer babbled, pretty hands flailing. He knew. Oh god, Gideon knew.

"You're telling me you didn't lose your virginity?" Gideon raised a prominent, dark eyebrow.

"Oh. Yes. I did." And of course, Spencer couldn't deny that even had Gideon not figured it out before, he certainly had now.

"And was it everything you'd thought it would be?" Gideon inhabited some universe in which every question, even ones this intimate, could be asked plausibly in a perfectly reasonable tone. Spencer had once heard Gideon ask a delusional suspect if the little men in his head were purple, or more an indigo, in that same tone. Or, almost that same tone. Right now, it sounded much warmer.

There was a long, tense pause before Spencer found himself saying, "No. No, God...Gideon it wasn't." Seems that tone was so warm he couldn't even manage to lie, even though he knew he was being played. "It was so wrong. I don't know her. I don't feel her in me..." His hand pressed unconsciously to his concave belly. "There's no pull, no...ache."

"You wanted to wait until you were in love, didn't you? Why did you change your mind?" Gideon didn't smile, or indicate in any way how he felt about such a position.

"Because it was...foolish to wait. Foolish to wait for something that may never come." Or even worse, something that's come, but must by all laws of common sense and practice must remain unfulfilled. Spencer found himself hovering nearer to Gideon, as he so often did, hoping for a scent or a faint impression of the other man's body heat.

"Some people are content with simple mutual pleasure. Some people place a different value on their sexuality. One is no more correct than the other." Gideon's voice remained constant, even as he visibly noted Spencer's increased proximity.

"I can't...just do it, Gideon. She was wrong." Not erroneous, no. Wrong. Cosmically wrong. Karmically wrong. Wrong down to the bone, down two layers of pinked scrubbed blistering skin.

"Don't see her again," Gideon replied, flatly. So flatly that Spencer's eyes raised in response, to see if what he heard underneath was real: tight, quivering, controlled jealousy.

"No," Spencer breathed. "No, I won't. She deserves better than someone who isn't even..." Enjoying himself.

"You deserve better, Spencer. You deserve someone who treasures you for your brilliance, cherishes you for your sweetness, and wishes for all the world he could protect you from every ugly thing, even when he knows it's wrong, and he can't, and he'd be doing you a disservice to even try." Jason was still so in command of himself. Every word, every inflection, and Spencer was simply too turned around and inside out to decipher whether this was a test, a declaration, or a simple slip of the pronoun. How could he gamble when he didn't even know the rules of the game?

It came down to trust, in the end. Spencer trusted Gideon. Trusted him enough that he knew that even if he was about to deep-throat his loafer and make the mother of all bad assumptions, Gideon wouldn't hold it against him. Well, for long. His agile mind sifted through his options, he asked himself 'if you only get one chance, one thing to feel before he laughs in your face, what would it be?', and then he knew. He just knew what his one thing was.

He grasped one of Gideon's hands and brought it to his face. Big, rough hand, and it felt so good when he pressed it to his cheek. Spencer's eyes drifted half-closed, and he leaned into the warmth. There were a good many things he could say right now, but they would be superfluous.

Gideon did not yank his hand away, nor did he make any outraged noises. Instead, his other hand came up, cupped the other side of Spencer's face, and he leaned in until he could bring their foreheads together. "This can't happen."

"You're the one I wanted," Spencer whispered plaintively. "You're the only one I want." The only one he's ever wanted enough to let inside. "You want it, too."

"What I want is not material. What you want is not material. You're a very young man, and you need someone like you." And yet, Gideon wasn't letting him go. Wasn't stepping back.

The scent, the soft puff of warm breath against his face conspired to make Spencer tilt his head, Gideon's words going in one ear, and out the other. "Gideon, I'm sorry, but no." His heart raced, as much from the position and the proximity as from the fact that he just said no to Jason Gideon. "You have no right to tell me what I need, even if you think you know. I need you. I need these hands and that mouth and I need you to push me down and cover me and fuck me and make me yours."

Gideon's eyes were still tightly shuttered as his hand slid down from Spencer's face, past his slender shoulder, down a long arm to close around his wrist. It was too snug a grip. A bruise seemed likely. "And when they all find out I'm fucking you? What then? Have you thought at all? Because I have."

Predictably, all Spencer took from that entire statement was that Gideon had considered having sex with him. "Tell me what you've thought," he begged softly. "Please." The bruising hand around his wrist was a dull throb, and the way his heart had to pound to force the blood past it was the most arousing thing he'd ever felt.

"So many things, Spencer. So many." Before Spencer even knew he was being moved, Gideon had him pressed back against the door, his hard cock fitted to the hollow of Spencer's hip. "I thought of your beautiful, pale body splayed across my dark sheets, every elegant line straining for release. Those pretty hands clenching helplessly as I open you, claim you, erase the touch of everyone else who ever laid a hand on you. The noises you'd make as I speared you deep, worked you, never satisfied until you scream my name and come so hard you lose everything in the world except me." Gideon's breath was hot, intimate on the side of Spencer's throat, just over that pounding pulse, and Spencer was sure, absolutely sure, that he was going to shake right out of his skin, make an unforgivable mess in his underwear, humiliate himself completely. "Now you see why I stay away."

"I'm not afraid of you." Spencer's voice sounded weak even to himself, but his free hand darted out to grab Gideon's shirt, fingers fisting in the fabric desperately.

"And I never want you to be." Gideon's eyes, when they met Spencer's, were as dark with exhaustion as they were with lust.

"Haven't I always surprised you? How many times have you been sure I would break?" Spencer knew how they looked at him, how they all were waiting for him to hit the wall and shatter. But it hadn't happened, and it wouldn't happen.

"One. One time, Spencer." This time.

"Get off me." The snarl surprised Spencer when it erupted past his clenched teeth. The clenching hand shoved, even though Gideon weighed enough that if he didn't want to be moved, he wouldn't be. He let Spencer have this one, though, backing off and letting the boy escape. "You just have it all figured out, don't you, Gideon? Do you have someone else picked out for me? Are you that much of a masochist? Another go with JJ, maybe, because that worked out so well last time? Why don't you just auction me off to whomever you think is suitable, since what I want doesn't matter?"

"Now you're just being a brat," Gideon growled, his wavering cool dissipating more and more by the second.

"No. YOU are." Spencer was surprising even himself. "Did you enjoy touching me? Did you like it? Did it get you hot?"

"You could tell it did. That I did," Gideon ground out the words.

"Then it's really too bad that you threw away your chance." Spencer's lower lip quivered, but he remained resolute, squaring his shoulders and heading for the door. He's never had much in the way of dignity, between the bullies and the psychopaths, so he's taking it where he can now. At least he'll be able to hold his head up "“ he didn't beg.

Well, okay. Not more than the once.

Gideon's voice cut through the rush of blood in his ears. "Did I?" he asked softly.

Spencer paused by the door for a heartbeat, but the words were just too many, and too disturbing, and just this once he's pretty sure he really doesn't know the answer for the all the questions threatening to drown him.

He looked back, hair messy and in his eyes, long enough to let Gideon see just how confused he really was, and then he walked out the door and down the short flight of stairs into the busy bullpen.

***