DON’T.
Emily sits on the bed, the note in her hand as she watches the sky darken.
Don’t what? Don’t talk? Don’t walk? Don’t think?
There’s a lot of blackness waiting to roll out of the night. Waiting behind the horizon, drifting out over the water, settling there, calming the waves. The city lights are a memory. The island lights are votives, prayers lit against the inevitability of nightfall.
Her phone rings. She picks it up.
“Hey. I see you made it all right. So how’s the weather up north?”
“Hey, Derek,” she says. “Not bad. A little cool, but it’s supposed to warm up sometime tomorrow. How about you?”
“I can’t complain. It’s been nice.”
“Glad to hear it. How’s the team?”
“Getting along. We miss your smiling face, though.”
Emily laughs. “Sure. Sure you do.”
“Enjoy your time off. Relax. Don’t think about us. That’s an order, and that one comes directly from Hotch. Drink lots of Cape Codders and get a couple of hunks in trunks to serve them to you.” He laughs. “That one comes directly from Penelope.”
Emily chuckles and walks to the window. “How is everybody?”
“Hotch is working. Well, we’re all working, but Hotch is pulling extra. Not that you should be surprised or anything. Penelope and I are thinking about taking Reid out to a club this weekend. We need to blow the stink off him, you know? Get him out of that library he calls an apartment even if it takes chains to do it. Oh, and Rossi’s freaky girlfriend is in town. Haven’t seen much of his mug around for the last couple of days.”
“Hey,” says Emily. “I like Rhiannon.”
“I like her too, don’t get me wrong,” says Morgan. “But that girl’s custom made, if you know what I’m saying.”
“Yeah, I do. She’s one of a kind, all right.”
“She and Reid are going to some mythology lecture this weekend.” He laughs. “Reid’s been quoting Joseph Campbell at me all day long.”
“You know Reid.”
“Yeah. Listen, if anything serious goes down, someone will call you. We won’t keep you out of the loop. Okay?”
“I appreciate it, Derek. Thanks.”
“I’ll see you when you get back. Night.”
“Good night.”
She hangs up and tosses the phone onto the bed. Her feet itch for the beach. She steps into a pair of sandals and leaves the room behind. The cold raw dark envelops her, wind pushing at her front as she moves through the dunes, walking down to the place where the water thins out. She looks up, sees more stars than she has seen in her entire lifetime, and though she knows a sky like this one is the purview of dreams, it’s as real as the cold under her feet, the sand between her toes, the tang of salt in the air.
Emily starts to walk.
Two things fight for primacy in her mind: a memory of herself as a teenager on this beach, sneaking away for a single untrammeled breath, and the fantasy of her phone ringing, how she would answer, remembering that day as she did it, the fog, the strangeness of her young voice caught inside it. The smell of things stranded at low tide, cooking to death in the heat. Foyet’s voice, low and filthy and cozening, surveying the mild curve of this beach with her feet in the dark as she half-dreamed about the foggy light, the wind sideways in her hair and drawing goosebumps on her legs.
Her voice, drowning in the sounds of wind and surf, asking where he is, feeling his answer even as the words escaped her mouth; she would hold her phone in tight fingers and remember how much she’d hated being here, cut off from the world, tasting those memories, boundaries stretching and made out of time, meditating on her old unseasoned bitterness as she imagines him hiding in the dunes, on his belly, he and the earth flesh to flesh. She imagines him watching and sees herself as the object of his voyeurism, letting the knowledge walk into her with conscious ease, the dozing sensitivity in her skin awakening and swapping stories with her bones. Being that girl: hot, restless, trying to taunt something out of the night.
And then…what?
The beach breaks into a broad sandbar that curves back toward the mainland. She keeps the lights at her back, feeling them recede, her feet delivering her deeper into the dark. More stars come out, burning in swarms through the black. She pauses to take off her sandals. The water hits her toes, cold enough to numb. She stands still, sandals dangling from her fingers, and looks toward the dunes.
In her mind, she is alone on a deserted and undeveloped stretch of beach with George Foyet. She is moving, ethereal and hot, in the frame of his regard. She is soft. She is trembling. Thinking about the girl she was, an unsettled teenager who played with knives and dreamed dreams of hot blades and yearned for someone to come along and excise her from the flesh of her life, cut her out like a tumor, eat her alive”none of these things shield her from the facts. That long-gone girl is not a talisman. She will not break free from her cage of years and storm the beach. Those carefully rationed memories are not bullets. Out here, in the black, beside the water, she is unarmed.
Nowhere to run, baby, and nowhere to hide. Not a soul out here to hear you scream.
The thought does not frighten as much as it should. There’s relief in the blunt truth: no interference, no prying eyes, no interest but her own. Just him, just her, standing on opposite sides of the darkness with all those things silted up between them: roses and dreams, horror and burning, the fury of a touch, the cold smooth longing of a bullet. The yearning of a trigger finger and the breath. All these things hide in an empty space carved out of ocean winds.
This is lover’s language. These are the words of the obsessed.
Emily tosses her sandals up onto the dry sand and squats, letting her fingertips trail in the water. The cold comes up into her blood and counterbalances her raging heat.
Okay, okay. Why not? Isn’t it all engineered this way? Isn’t this the rightful fruit of all his labor? The parallels between obsession and desire are bold and highlighted and obvious. Hell, they aren’t even parallels. They’re the same thing in different clothes.
The impulse to run locks up inside her feet. She looks at the water, feeling the darkness change; invitation in its turn and turn about dance, dread from the left and temptation on the right, first one hand and then the other.
DON’T.
Don’t what? Take the things inside me to Hotch, spread them out on a towel to dry? Tell, like we’re a couple of naughty children?
She submerges her hands. Her fingers ripple, pale beneath the rushing water. The water backs up at her wrists, yanking the sand out from beneath her palms. Everything about the ocean is made to knock you off balance.
Perhaps he didn’t make me his conspirator. Perhaps I wanted to step into that role.
Emily stands. She looks at the starlit crests of the waves, mantles of white foam rolling in onto the sand. She takes off her shorts, flinging them up past her sandals, and she runs full bore into the waves, charging them, challenging their rhythm with her body. The icy cold is a shock. She screams, the sudden drop in temperature turning over inside her head, slapping her awake. Water splashes off the fronts of her thighs and flies all the way up to her mouth. She gags at the salt. Waves plow into her knees and she trips, going down, flung under and into a spinning world of darkness, filled with the roaring of primitive gods and grains of sand rough against her face. She surfaces into shearing wind, wracked with chills, and she looks back toward the land.
“Blood in the water,” she whispers, wondering if her lips are blue. “There’s blood in the water.”
Emily turns her gaze to heaven, where a single thin star loses its grip on the sky. She watches it fall, shedding parts of itself, surrendering to the pull of gravity. This place is a temple. The sky is the altar and she is the sacrifice. Her entrails fold into obscure languages, whispering the future.
“God, I know we haven’t been on speaking terms for…well, years.” Her teeth chatter. Her nipples are cold pebbles. “But if you’re really there and not just a mythical construct, please. I want to make it through the night.”
George’s voice whispers inside her ear: You disappoint me.
The heat twists through her, wringing her flesh into goosebumps. It lands on her tongue and tastes like shame. It tastes like other things.