A/N: Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Ok, after my foray into Mark Gordon's mind *shudders* I've decided to stick to a more traditional route- the law. So watch out, Gordon. I'm going to assemble a crack team of lawyers who will finally win me the CM rights. And everything will be nice and legal.

"Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities." –C.S. Lewis

...

Since then, it became their ritual. Neither one were quite sure how it happened, but after work every Thursday he would show up at her apartment with a bashful look, and every Thursday she would surprise herself by always inviting him in. After a couple of weeks they even developed a comfortable routine. Reid would come inside, they would chat about whatever case they were currently working, eat, and then fall to watching movies or reading. Or arguing.

"No, the T'raltixx appeared in season three," she stated, folding her arms crossly. "You're just too stubborn to admit that I'm right."

"Adriana, I have an eidetic memory. I'm positive that it was season two."

"Well I'm positive that you're wrong."

Their arguments usually dissolved in one of them laughing and gloating over a trivial victory, while the other (usually Adriana) kicked them in the shins. Reid's shins were starting get a multi-colored array of bruises, but somehow, he didn't mind.

The second time he came over, he learned that she was even nerdier than she outwardly appeared to be. It happened when she offered Reid coffee and he told her that he took it with sugar. As she got up, she murmured reminiscently, "'Black as the devil, sweet as a stolen kiss.'"

The phrase sounded familiar to Reid. He frowned as he tried to place the obscure passage. "Do you speak Polish?" he asked, remembering that it was an ethnic saying.

"No, but you're close," Adriana smiled encouragingly. She prepared the coffee and wrinkled her nose with distaste when she put in the extra sugar for Reid. She preferred her coffee black.

It took him a few moments of scanning the repositories of his brain until he placed it. "Have you read Watchmen?" he inquired hopefully.

"Cool, you got it. That was, like, a really random sentence," she said, mildly impressed that he remembered it. But then again, the eidetic memory didn't let him forget much.

"So you read comic books?" he said interestedly.

"I prefer to call them 'graphic novels,'" she said with mock-snobbishness. She brought the coffee back to where they were sitting on the couch.

"But I didn't see any in your room," Reid said, referring to the comics

Her eyes narrowed. "Yeah, because you'd know all about my room, wouldn't you?" She added under her breath, "Sneak."

Reid still felt bad about that, but he was really curious to see what comics she read. "Can I see them?" he asked shyly.

Adriana glanced at him suspiciously. "Are you going to try to profile me again?"

"I promise I won't," Reid swore solemnly.

She deliberated thoughtfully, considering that she would be willingly letting him into her room this time. Her room was like her sanctuary. It was hers to hole up in the feigned safety of her bed. The tears on her pillows and the crumpled blankets from nightmares made the room into a fortress. In it, she was safe. No one and nothing could penetrate it. That was why she freaked out when she found him inspecting her room like evidence.

But then again… it was Reid. He hadn't done anything last time, and, under her supervision, he wouldn't touch anything he wasn't supposed to.

"Fine," she conceded.

They went into her room, and Adriana magically pulled out her numerous boxes of comics from under her bed. It wasn't that she was embarrassed enough to hide them; she just had nowhere else in her tiny room to put them. There were so many boxes, Reid didn't know how they fit under there.

She opened up one for their perusal. It contained about fifty slim comic books, all in clear plastic dividers.

"Nice," Reid said appreciatively, leafing through the very organized box. He saw she had an affinity for Jack Kirby and Alan Moore.

"Careful," she warned, "I have some collectors' issues in there. I keep the big volumes in the other boxes." With great precision, she plucked out her favorite issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, and settled her back against her bed to read it.

Reid carefully took one out and made to copy her position, sitting cross-legged. He looked over, and saw that she was already immersed in reading. It greatly amused and impressed him that she was actually a huge nerd and didn't attempt to hide it, like himself.

They sat on the hard floor, reading in silence for hours until the sunlight disappeared.

…

He learned that she had much different musical tastes than he would have ever expected. One day, she let him in and immediately Reid's ears were assaulted by heavy drumbeats and insanely loud guitar chords. The pounding, shrieking lyrics of the song almost made him take a step back.

He fought the urge to cover his ears and shouted, "You listen to metal?"

Adriana grinned and mercifully turned down the music. "Yup, I love it."

He gave her a skeptical look. She didn't look at all like those people who listen to heavy metal. Those people he associated with all-black clothes and piercings and criminal records.

Adriana picked up his unspoken opinion and sighed in exasperation, "It's true! I've always listened to it."

Lifting his eyebrows, "I think I'll stick to Beethoven, thanks."

"Beethoven?" Adriana scoffed. "Seriously? Bach is ten times better a composer."

Affronted, he proceeded to give her a point-by-point analysis of how the primary and secondary themes in Beethoven's symphonies that appear in set algebraic patterns usher in the reprise of the C-minor scherzo theme in many of his works. In Bach's defense, Adriana countered that at least his music hadn't been used for human conditioning on psychopaths. Yet another Clockwork Orange reference that passed Reid by.

Reid learned what her real laugh sounded like. Once, he tripped over a snag in her rug and almost fell on his face. She threw her head back and gave a genuine belly laugh that shook her whole torso. It snorted out of her mouth and then just exploded in hysterical giggles. Adriana was always embarrassed of her laugh because she thought it made her look like a complete spaz. While this was partially true, Reid observed that it also made her whole face brighten with joy.

He learned that when she talked about things she was truly passionate about, her eyes would alight with a sort of fire that he had never seen in them before. Her speech would speed up to a-mile-a-minute, and there would be no stopping her for anything.

"I mean, just imagine the intricate operations that occur in the space of one second in the basic cell!" she enthused. One of her hands was in the air, making excited gestures, while the other was bunched up in her hair, making it tangled and wild-looking. It matched the look on her face. They had been talking about the human genome project about ten minutes ago, but somehow they veered off topic. Now, Adriana was practically babbling about microbiology theorems.

"The Endosymbiotic theory provides for all of that, and the evolutionary aspects of cellular structure. It's actually amazing that it wasn't accepted back in 1905. Of course, the technology wasn't nearly advanced enough to yield conclusive enough evidence, but the theoretical applications could have at least been used to establish parameters for future research…"

Of course, Reid already knew all about the Endosymbiotic theory and its consequences. For some reason, though, he let her ramble on. He liked that she found seemingly commonplace things so fascinating. It reminded him of himself a little. Reid found that it felt nice to know that someone else found stuff like that interesting as well. But it was the excited look on her face that made him reluctant to say a word. That was the thing that stayed burned into his memory when he went home that day. He was unable, and sort of…. unwilling, to remove the image of her eyes alight with wonder and enthrallment.

And after about a month and a half of Thursday nights, he learned why she didn't have any pictures of her family.

…

"Hey, why does this have your name on it?"

The question, asked so casually, made Adriana start up so suddenly that her heart faltered in its steady beat. In a panicky and desperate move, she quickly snatched the folder right out of his hands. He couldn't have seen anything in it, but she still clutched it tight and scurried away until she was across the room from him.

Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to say smoothly, "Curiosity killed the cat, you know." Her shaking voice did nothing to conceal her trepidation.

"'The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity,'" Reid quoted and came a little closer to her, drawn to the mystery of the file.

"Anatole France?" Adriana guessed, trying to steer the conversation in a different direction.

Reid didn't fall for it. "Why does it have your name on it?" he asked again. "Does it have something to do with a case you worked on?"

"Sort of…" she started to answer before checking herself. "I mean, it's nothing. Nothing at all." She was entirely unconvincing.

"Why can't you tell me? I thought friends share information about each other."

Adriana glared at him, angry that he used the friends card. She couldn't believe that Reid might actually be taking advantage of their friendship just to pry a little more into her life. "Because I don't want to talk about it, ok? My file is completely uninteresting, and frankly, none of your goddamn business."

Her file? He took in her defensive tone and the way she held the file protectively. What was she trying to keep from him?

Reid wasn't sure why he was suddenly so desperate to delve into something that obviously upset her. Usually if someone told him to lay off as strongly as Adriana had, he would respect their request. But seeing the file on her table labeled with her name made him afraid that something happened to her, and he had to know what it was.

"What if I tell you about me?" Reid tried bargaining.

"What?"

"I'll tell you anything you want to know about me."

"Really?" Adriana asked disbelievingly. She knew Reid to be a pretty private person. She couldn't see him divulging his deep, dark secrets just to listen to her sordid story.

But he nodded and said, "I promise."

Adriana paused and deliberated. He had kept his last promise to her; he hadn't profiled her room when she let him in. And it would be a lie to say that she wasn't interested in learning more about Reid. She suspected he had to have had an interesting life, what with being a genius and all. On the other hand, she worked so hard all the time to keep her secrets hidden within her, firmly locked away. She didn't know if she could just tell everything to him now.

Reid himself didn't know what possessed him to basically promise his entire life's story just so he could learn whatever was haunting her in that file.

Adriana looked into Reid's face. It was so sincere and devoid of any sign of unkindness. She didn't know why, but she trusted him. It was completely illogical, considering that she knew she shouldn't trust anyone really, but she did nonetheless. Besides, she reasoned, he could easily ask Garcia to check into it, and she didn't want him to find out that way. So against her better judgment, against every fiber of her being, really, she said:

"Ok, but I have three conditions." She held up a finger as she listed them. "One, you will tell me your stuff first. Two, if I decide it doesn't match my story in-" she tried to think of a word, "…um, personal-ness, I can revoke my pledge to tell you anything."

It all sounded reasonable so far. "What's the third condition?" Reid asked cautiously.

With that question, Adriana went into the kitchen and poked around in the pantry cabinets. Pulling it out from the very back of a shelf, she turned to Reid, grimly holding a full bottle of tequila.

"My third condition is that I'm not going to be sober for this."

.

A/N: Ok, there's good news and bad news.

Good news: Next chapter is the one in which Adriana's past will finally be revealed! You'll finally learn about her family and what is inside the mysterious case file!

Bad News: I'm going on vacation for a month, and I won't have internet access the whole time. So… Uh. See you in a month, guys?

PLEASE DON'T HATE ME

Nuwanda31- thanks x how much I'll miss you (ie A LOT)