By the beginning of April, I am finally curled up in a blanket around a fire in Shenandoah park. The campgrounds have been open for a few weeks and park ranger privileges but it's still too cold for most campers to come out. I can hear all sorts of crickets in the woods. The fire crackles. It's the kind of smoke I don't mind smelling.

I take a sip from the thermos, drinking in the soup. It's briny, sweet too, and I honestly can't get enough of it. The flavour is a bit of a surprise since Stéphane's always liked more plain foods. This must be another thing he is trying, btu I hope he doesn't give up this new hobby. I tilt my head to the side, cracking my neck. It's such a lovely evening, though it is a cold one. Stéphane and I fall into silence so well with each other. We've chitchatted about work, but mostly, we're content just to drink our soup and bathe in the quiet outdoors.

Maybe it's not for me, but I get why he likes it here.

I was going to run my speech by him, but I'm barely done. I really need to keep working, because I'm not good at bullshitting. I was going to something sappy and silly about how she's really good at finding beauty in everything, and I try to appreciate life more because of it. Cletus is an artist too. Make a joke about her liking a little do-it-yourself project, but I don't think I can get away with it.

"Caro says you're seeing someone," Stéphane smirks to himself.

I groan, audibly. I close the thermos, "I'm not."

"I know," he shakes his head, looking over at me from beneath the bundle of blankets on him. "I just wanted to make sure you're aware she thinks you are."

I reach over for my water bottle and sip it. The liquid is warm too, and I swallow it down with a sour expression.

Stéphane's eyes widen, "you're lying to her?"

I start to chug the water.

Stéphane waits and waits, and the water keeps going. Until I'm at the bottom of the water bottle and I've got nothing else to chug. Already, I feel bloated.

"Is it the guy who I met at the pub?"

I drop the water bottle back into the dirt. At least with the only lightening besides the stars before us red, my blush is hidden, "yes. Dr. Reid."

"Does he know you're lying to her?"

I shrug, "he will. We're supposed to meet up Sunday night for some wedding prep."

Of course, I don't tell Stéphane I'm not sure what the prep is. It's probably buying an outfit for him or something, since he's already asked me what is appropriate to where. I had to give him my phone number so he'd stop slipping me notes at work. I told him it's just two nights, the rehearsal and the wedding itself.

Fucking JJ's roommate with her complicated dress codes has set me up for failure in convincing Reid it's more casual than he's expecting.

"I'm seeing someone," he points out.

My jaw drops, "shut up."

He grabs his water bottle and makes a big show of chugging it. I shake my head, staring at him, and he doesn't relent.

"Is it another park ranger?" I ask.

He keeps chugging.

"I can ask one of them, if you'd like."

Stéphane spits out his water. It blows over the fire. He starts coughing, laughing, and I do too.

"It's not a co-worker," he tells me, finally coming to himself. He shifts in his chair. "She's a park regular. We've only been on two dates, and it's kind of frowned upon to date regulars so we're keeping it on the down low."

I look over at him. He's smiling, even though he just choked on water. Maybe it's naïve for me, but I see how he smiles in the firelight.

"You like her then?" I ask.

He smiles, "yeah, I think I do. But, not enough to introduce her to the family. You and I are doing opposite heists, it seems."

"I'm not stealing anything," I point out.

"Just Caro's affection," he grins.

I shrug. She's been more tolerable, even with the wedding barreling down toward her so rapidly. Cletus seems unbothered. Then again, she says he's very patient and good at grounding her. I absolutely dread saying it, but it seems like he is a good influence on her.

"Maybe you can write the speech I need to give then. I'm not sure how to congratulate Mr. and Mrs. Clark. You could probably come up with the romance stuff for me," I look at him, trying my best to make my eyes plead.

Stéphane laughs, "and your heist continues."

I turn back to my thermos of soup. It is a warm that I don't mind.

The speech writing doesn't end. After we pack up for bed, I keep working on it, and when Stéphane gives me a ride back the next afternoon I keep trying to write it. Getting a date was a fraction of the battle. This is where things truly start to become difficult. The only time I truly let myself have a reprieve is when the door buzzes, and I realize Reid is here. I buzz him up. He knocks on the door and comes in, but doesn't take off his coat or put down the bag he has with him.

"Come on," he says. "I've ordered a taxi."

"A taxi?" I ask, forcing myself away from a draft. I know that when I get back here I'm just going to crumple it into a ball.

Still, I throw on my outerwear and follow him downstairs. True to form, there is a taxi down there waiting for us. We pile in the back.

"How was your trip with your brother?" he asks.

I look at him, "pretty nice, actually. If you're an outdoorsy person anyway."

He smiles, "what did you do?"

And so I tell him. Bits and pieces anyway. At least, I tell him we made food and sat around a campfire. The speech I keep hidden inside me, since I hope it's actually somewhere in there and that I won't walk up on the wedding day without one. Really, I should mention what I didn't tell Caro. It's a good time anyway, before he actually buys anything to fully commit to going to the wedding. I hold my tongue around the words. I'm used to casual avoidance.

It's easy though, to slip into conversation with him. His weekend has been more entertaining as he's just submitted the last research paper's for his bachelor's degree in philosophy. Of course, all of that work is so little for him. He typed out his twenty-page final paper on ignorance and responsibility in ten hours. It's a ridiculous fast pace, but it's becoming of someone getting a ridiculous degree. Maybe he feels the need to prove something, not me.

"Moral ignorance is not all that complicated," Reid explains. "It gets more complicated when we think about what people should know and what they could know. Culpability requires knowing – it's the basis for mens rea in our legal system. It's not just about defenses like mistake of law or mistake of fact. Outside of a legal threshold, what really results in wilful blindness?"

I smirk, "this is why I prefer statistics, Reid."

"I just think it's fascinating to hold people to standards of what they could have known," Reid explains. His eyes seem to light up. "I've never really had a difficulty knowing things, of course. I never thought of curiosity as a virtue before, but people are in the moral wrong for choosing to be incurious, to not just avoid pieces of knowledge, but to be neutral in searching for information."

There are libraries filled with things I don't know. Forests, bigger than Shenandoah Park, where every tree is something I do not know. There is even more than I choose not to know, I suppose. If were up to me, I would choose for Luc not to come to my door and tell me that my brother's friend is on parole now. I would choose not to have taken that course on genocide with Estelle, and I would chose not to have heard Spencer explain all the ways I'm being immoral.

"I mean, don't they say that ignorance is bliss?" I look at him. "Do you think it's fair we ask people to suffer by knowing?"

Reid blinks. I can see it now. Maybe. I'm not a profiler, but I can see the way his eyes look like amber under the golden light of the taxi. Warm and sweet and liquid like honey. I can see the way he looks at me, the way his shoulders raise and his throat tightens as he holds in a breath.

I'm like that too, I think. Red hair, pink freckled face, and not much that looks like my family. Green eyes like Bastien and Caro, a womb I shared at the same time as Stéphane, but a birthday just to myself. But he saw them in me. He's a profiler, so he's good at noticing everything. All I know how to do is actively hide information. I'm doing it from him now. I've always been doing it.

The thing is, I don't want him to suffer. He sees enough out in the field. Sitting in the back of this taxi, trapped in a city I don't even want to live in, I know he can see me. Maybe he sees me more often than I see myself. I don't often look in mirrors.

"I don't think I'd ever be happy to live a life without knowing," he tells me. "Even if the truth hurts."

I swallow. The cab pulls over. I linger for just a second too long. We've never been closer. We can never be closer. I can't give him the truth, only stories. The version of the truth as I see it isn't something I can even give myself. I am doomed to have pink cheeks in the cold.

So, I turn to the cab driver to settle the bill.

All I am is a person built of things I could be.

~~~~~

Obsessed. Next chapter, also obsessed. I am obsessed forever and ever and ever, screaming and crying and throwing up. It's fine.