It was that Wednesday that JJ and Garcia took three hours out of their day to take Emily to lunch. It had felt like forever since she’d seen JJ and it was a welcome relief to see the blond’s smiling face. Nevertheless, both women knew there was something up with their group’s dark-haired member.
“Alright, Sugar, start talking,” Garcia prodded once they were seated.
Emily sighed. Where was she even supposed to start?
“Try the beginning,” JJ suggested with a grin.
So Emily outlined everything up to Jack’s weekend with his father. She took them through the calls, took them through the text messages, took them through her reactions to his presence, his voice, living in his house. JJ and Garcia listened without interrupting, without so much as batting an eyelash, just listening. This was what she loved about her girls. They didn’t interrupt to criticize, didn’t interrupt to offer their opinions, didn’t interrupt period.
JJ leaned back with a whistle when Emily was finished. “You are head over heels. This is worse than I thought.”
“Worse?” Emily asked with a gulp. If she was saying worse now, what would JJ’s reaction be when she told her about Jack?
“Worse is a relative term,” Garcia picked up. “I believe what Jayje is trying to say is that head over heels is an understatement.”
Emily closed her eyes with a groan. “And this is supposed to help how?”
“Who said anything about helping?” JJ asked. “I think you’re quite thoroughly beyond help, Em.”
Garcia rolled her eyes. In JJ’s attempts to keep herself from getting hurt, the pretty blond had all but closed her heart off. JJ was her next target, but for now, Emily was so much closer to that eternal happiness than Jayje. “Come on, Jayje,” she scolded playfully. “No more agent. Where’s the gossip girl we know and love.”
JJ sighed. “I have cases stuck in my head,” she admitted. “Which reminds me, how the hell do you manage to get Hotch to settle down? The guy was a mess, then he talked to you.”
Those were exactly the types of things that Emily really didn’t want to hear.
Garcia grinned. She’d heard about the fabled conversations. There’d been a case in nearby Fredericksburg, and Garcia had been surprised at the number of time she head one of her teammates tell her Hotch was on the phone. With Emily.
For her part, Emily had loved the calls. She loved talking to him, loved piecing together the cases. She looked at things from a different perspective of the team “ they all looked at cases from different perspectives “ and sometimes she helped. Sometimes she didn’t, at least not with the case. They all fed off of each other, so it didn’t really surprise her that the team dynamics were a little off kilter. She knew they’d fallen into a different routine without her there and knew from their closed cases that it wasn’t exactly effecting their performances, but when you got used to taking out your tension in certain ways, to change it was always difficult.
“I don’t say anything particularly special,” Emily admitted. “I actually have no idea. If he’s calmer when he gets off the phone with me it’s not deliberate.”
“Well believe me when I say he’s calmer,” JJ said. “When are you due back?”
Emily looked down at the table top. “I’m moving back into my apartment this weekend. My eval is Thursday.”
“Has it really been that long?”
Emily nodded. “Four and a half months.”
JJ and Garcia exchanged a look. Elle Greenaway had been out for four months after her shooting and come back only to kill someone in cold blood and leave the unit. “Are you sure that’s enough time?”
Emily nodded again. “Oh yeah. I need to come back.”
“Why not wait one more week? Two?” JJ offered.
“What’s going on?” Emily asked with narrowed eyes. She had a good idea, but she hadn’t been holding on for dear life. And she liked to believe she’d adjusted to being attacked and the aftermath just fine, not to mention she hadn’t been attacked on the job. The eval was going to be a formality.
“I just think maybe you’d be okay to take a little bit more time,” JJ repeated.
Emily shook her head. “I can’t. You said it yourself, and I know it. I’m screwed enough as it is without spending another two weeks in that house.”
“You sound like you hate it,” Garcia said, cocking her head to the side.
“Just the opposite and you know it,” Emily answered. “I just… Coming back to work is going to be hard enough, knowing everything I do about that house and about Aaron. I don’t want to put any more strain on the adjustments that we’re going to have to make.”
It did make logical sense.
“So what are you going to do?” JJ asked.
Emily sighed. “Whatever I can, I guess.”
“Why not go for it.”
Emily sighed in exhaustion. Garcia was pushing and pushing and pushing and though Emily knew JJ was on board with it all, she was flat out sick of going over the reasons why she and Hotch couldn’t be anything more than friends and colleagues. She opened her mouth to explain it, only to have JJ hold up a hand.
“Denial is comfortable, I know, but hang on a minute. You see one side. You see your side of this whole coin. Even Derek would agree that there’s something solid between you and Hotch,” she said. “I don’t think all of this is just protection of an injured colleague. He didn’t have to take you in. He doesn’t have to call you during cases to keep you up to date. He doesn’t have to text you, get your opinion, keep you in the loop. In fact, really, he can’t.”
“He reacts to you like he reacts to a conversation about his son,” Garcia added. “JJ says he’s different after talking with you. Derek tells me he’s distracted, not all there. Then he talks to you, makes sure you’re okay, gets your opinion and he’s back on track again.”
Emily was shaking her head. “I’m a teammate. My opinion counts.”
“But he doesn’t have to call you. Most of the team cut off contact with Elle when she went out,” JJ said. “We didn’t want her to have to battle someone else’s monsters and her own.”
“And that’s only now. You should have seen his reaction to your absence from work the day we found out you were in the hospital. And you saw his reaction to your story to begin with.”
JJ nodded in agreement to Garcia’s arguments. “You didn’t get to see him go white “ I swear “ when I told him you were almost eviscerated.”
“Look, I appreciate this, I think,” Emily said. “But it’s circumstantial at best. You all rushed to the hospital when Pen found out I was there. You and Pen almost bit my head off when you saw the stitches. And Agent Greenaway and I are two different people, completely different people. I wasn’t shot on the job, I was stabbed coming home from a case.”
“You know how to get through to him,” JJ contradicted. “You know how to crack past that barrier of the Special Agent In Charge Hotchner. I’ve never seen an agent do that. Just Haley and Jack.”
“Anyone would give into Jack,” Emily said in exasperation, completely forgetting she hadn’t mentioned the six-year-old in conversation. She knew she’d made a mistake when the words were out of her mouth and she couldn’t take it back.
“How do you know that?” Garcia asked, a glint in her eye.
Emily sighed. There was no use hiding it, not from Garcia. “Haley dropped him off on Friday and picked him up on Sunday.”
“You’ve met Jack?” JJ repeated in awe. “The infamous first-born son.”
“He’s adorable,” Emily gushed, giving up pretenses. “And damn smart.”
“Not a surprise,” JJ agreed with a nod.
“Tell us everything,” Garcia ordered. “Don’t leave anything out.”
Once again, Emily talked and talked and talked. There weren’t enough good things she could say about Jack, nor about the way Aaron was with the boy. What surprised Emily was the way both of her usually chatty friends were completely silent when she was done. “What is it?”
“We’ve tried telling you a million different ways you know.”
“Tell me what?” Emily asked in exasperation.
“This thing between you and Hotch,” JJ began. “It’s not one-sided, Em.”
Emily’s eyes widened. She’d never really thought about it. She’d been too busy trying to convince herself that she wasn’t falling in love with him to worry about him falling for her. It hadn’t even crossed her mind. “You’re kidding.”
“Not at all,” Garcia agreed. “He introduced you to Jack. Jack is the man’s most prized possession. If the man’s not in love with you he’s at least got more than friendship on the brain. But the way he’s gone about this… He cares more than a boss should about an employee, even in our jobs.”
JJ was nodding. “We saw it before, we just didn’t say anything because we know both of you. We knew that something had to happen before either of you would toss the job aside for something better.”
The job was something that had come up in many of Emily’s mental arguments about the pros and cons of starting a relationship with Hotch. They worked in a high-stress environment, it was inevitable that one would slip during a shoot out, a hostage situation, when they had to send someone in… Heck, she’d watched him argue with himself a number of times, not just when she was the one putting herself in danger “ though he always seemed to take longer to decide when it was her “ but when any of his agents put themselves in a situation where they could get seriously injured, or worse. She wasn’t sure she wanted to think about what he would be like if they were more than coworkers.
Plus, she could never, and would never ask him to leave. She knew how much the job meant to him, saw it in every case they closed, the frustration in the hard lines of his body when they got a new one. The monsters they battled were never going to stop coming. Even if something grew out of this, something she knew they would both take very, very seriously, they were going to have a lot of hoops to leap through. She almost wanted to make a list of things, ponder out if, at the end of the day, taking the risk of jumping him first was going to be worth the potential fallout.
“There’s no guarantee it’ll be better,” Emily said finally.
Garcia reached out and put a hand over the brunette's. “There’s never any guarantees,” she said. “Everything happens for a reason, remember? So many you getting injured was nature’s way of making both of you wake up and smell the attraction.”
“There’s so much to lose.”
JJ was a little shocked. It wasn’t often that Emily was this pessimistic about a relationship. Heck, it wasn’t normal that any of them were pessimistic about relationships, simply because they saw too much darkness. They liked to talk about relationships with happy thoughts, even if each of them knew the statistics behind the psychology of it all. But, for a time, they could push aside the statistics for something much more fun and light-hearted, even if they knew the relationship wouldn’t last.
But JJ knew that if Emily and Hotch started something, they’d be in it for the long haul. You didn’t start a relationship with a coworker you spend endless amounts of time with if you were just going to throw it all away when the going got tough. That just wasn’t the way they worked. Dedication in the job would translate into dedication in the relationship. Not to mention Hotch was the type to hold on as tight as he could to the good things in his life. And he’d been burned by Haley, JJ knew that, so starting another relationship would mean he’d dissected everything he could about the instability of human nature and come up with more pros than cons. A relationship with Emily, JJ knew, would have more of those pros than cons, if he created the list right.
“And so much more to gain,” she said softly, finally. “You guys would be good together.”
Emily nodded slowly, as if accepting what JJ was saying. “But for how long?”
Neither blond had an answer to that.