CHAPTER ELEVEN
Moaning woke him first. He wasn’t a notoriously light sleeper, but he didn’t sleep like the dead either. After the moaning came whimpers. Which could only mean one thing: nightmares. But he had a room by himself, didn’t he? No, his mind reminded him. He was sharing with Emily Prentiss. And it was Emily that was having a nightmare.
She’d kicked the sheet and blankets off of her body, pooling where at the bottom of her bed with the exception of the one sheet that had twisted around her leg. But it was the way her t-shirt had ridded up that caught his eye and held it. The white bandage was there, over the burn that was still healing. It would scar, the ambulance personnel had told her, but it would heal if she took good care of it. He hadn’t seen it since the night she was attacked but now, with the way the moon came into the room, the white bandage virtually shone.
Hotch kicked off his own blankets, flicking on one of the bedside lamps as he moved to her side. “Emily. Emily wake up.”
She thrashed on the bed, crying out. “No! Get off me!”
He dodged the fist that came up at him. “Emily, wake up. Please, Em, wake up.” He could feel his heart starting to race. It was breaking his heart to see her like this.
“Get off! Let go!”
He hadn’t wanted to touch her, to pin her down. He wanted to avoid putting her in any sort of position that would remind her of the things she’d been though. His words, however, weren’t helping. SO he reached out, grasping her shoulder to shake her. “Emily, you’re having a nightmare. Wake up.”
She bolted up in bed, chest heaving, collapsing back when her arms wouldn’t hold her. He turned to turn on the other light ensuring the shadows that he knew splashed across his face wouldn’t be as intense. Her eyes had fallen closed again. “Emily?”
Her eyes fluttered open. “Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” he told her, taking one of her hands from where she’d settled them on her stomach.
She pursed her lips. “I woke you up.”
“Emily, it’s okay.”
“Talk to me.”
Hotch wrinkled his brow. “What?”
“Talk to me. About anything. Just… distract me.”
What was he supposed to say? What was he supposed to talk about? She’d put him on the spot. “Tell me a story.”
“You’re turning this around on me.”
“You put me on the spot,” he replied. He waved to the bed. “May I?”
She shifted, nodding.
He slid in beside her, pulling the blankets around them both. He took her hand again, pulling it across his lap. “Plus, you’ve been to so many more interesting places than I have.”
“At what cost?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Cost?”
“Hotch come on,” Emily replied, rolling her eyes. “Do you want to have that conversation now? Do you remember our first conversation about politics?”
“I do,” he promised. Of course he remembered that conversation. How could he forget a conversation where she was a) borderline subordinate and b) when her eyes flashed like that? Haley or no Haley, now that he was thinking about her almost constantly, he’d realized his attraction to her had been a long time coming. “That doesn’t mean you haven’t been to fantastic places, Em.”
Much to his surprise, when she took her hand back, she took his with it, spreading his hand over her thigh. She focused her gaze on their hands, hers ghosting over his skin, tracing the fingers on top of the bedspread. “I went to Rome once.”
“I hear it’s a beautiful city.”
“It is,” she agreed. “My dad was supposed to join me.”
“I thought this was going to be a happy story.”
“Sorry. It’s just…. I wasn’t the first time he did it. He sent my cousin Adam instead.”
He watched her continue to inspect his hand, ignoring his body’s firing at the thought of the skin beneath it. “Were you close with your cousin?” He wasn’t sure when or if he was going to get this kind of opportunity again, this kind of opportunity to delve into who Emily Prentiss was.
“Not at all,” she said, shaking her head. “At least, not with Adam. Robin and I went on a road trip through the southern states my sophomore year at Yale. Thelma and Louise had nothing on us.”
“What about Adam?”
“He had a tendency to leave me behind. My dad sent him so I wouldn’t be alone in a foreign country and all, then he would get into so much more trouble than I could ever dream of being in. I spoke better Italian than he did anyway.”
“You speak Italian too?” It really shouldn’t have surprised him since her background was in linguistics.
Emily shook her head with a little laugh. “But I do speak fluent Spanish. Close enough. But don’t say that to an Italian.”
He chuckled. “So it wasn’t a favourite.”
“No, but a good trip, in the end. In some ways. I bailed Adam out of an Italian jail,” she offered.
She was cuddling into his arm now, her body relaxing as exhaustion took hold again. He slid his arm behind her to keep it from going numb. She adjusted with him and while one of her hands continued tracing his, the other curled into his t-shirt. He smiled at the childish nature of the gesture. She was falling asleep again. He couldn’t decide if he wanted her to.
“It’s why I have trust issues.”
He arched an eyebrow at how easily that had slipped from her mouth. He knew she did, a side-effect of his job, he swore. He didn’t expect her to admit it. “Because your father abandoned you in Rome?”
She giggled, grasping his hand as she curled into him more. “You wouldn’t abandon me in Rome, would you, Hotch?”
Could that have been amore loaded question? “Of course not, Emily. I wouldn’t abandon you.”
“Of course not. You’re here.”
Her voice was starting to trail off. He hunkered down further, taking her with him. Vanilla and coconut saturated his nose between her and her pillow and yet there was still that underlying tang of laundry detergent, probably of the hotel. He wondered absently what her sheets would smell like. “Yeah, honey. I’m here.”
And there was nowhere else he wanted to be at that moment.