Aaron preferred quiet Christmases. Haley had dropped off Jack that day at noon, and he’d return the six-year-old tomorrow around the same time. He and Jack were sitting on the couch at home, Sean in the kitchen whipping up some kind of spectacular dinner, like he had years prior. When Aaron reflected on things, he realized he should have known Sean would have done much better in the kitchen than he ever could behind the desk.
“Aaron, can you give me a hand?”
Father and son traded glances. No one was allowed in the kitchen while Sean was cooking. Ever. “Sure.” He made his way into the other room, his mouth starting to water at the smells assaulting his nose.
Sean looked up at his brother. “Good. Stand there and tell me about Emily.”
He’d known Sean hadn’t wanted his help. “What do you want to know?”
“What is there to know? I know she’s Ambassador Prentiss’ daughter, I know that she’s drop dead gorgeous, but where did you meet her? How did things come about? Last I heard you weren’t even dating after Haley up and left.”
Sometimes Sean could be insensitive, like he had been with the comment about Haley. “We met through the FBI.”
Sean looked up and nodded once. “You met at the FBI, got it. Where?”
“BAU.”
Sean put two and two together faster than his parents ever would. “She works under you? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“I like it.” Why Sean had to hit on their biggest bone Aaron would never know.
“She mind? I mean, it is going to be her reputation that gets slaughtered, right?”
Aaron sighed. “We didn’t just meet and that was it. I was married when we met.”
Sean raised an eyebrow.
“I never cheated on Haley.”
“Duh, that doesn’t mean when the marriage fell apart you didn’t start looking elsewhere for companionship.”
Aaron puffed out a breath of air. “Look, Sean, Emily is beautiful, she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s-“
“A dream come true, I get it. You still haven’t made me feel better about the whole boss-subordinate thing.” Sean knew the last thing his brother wanted to do was give up his job. The FBI had a fairly strict no fraternization policy and Sean knew the department chief had it out for his older brother. He figured she wouldn’t take well to the idea that he was breaking solid rules.
“We’ve been able to keep it out of the office.”
Sean raised an eyebrow. “And away on cases?”
“The team already knows. They’re okay with it.”
Younger brother turned to older brother, reading apprehension in posture and eyes. “Look, Aaron, I’m not looking to ruing things between you,” he said honestly. “This is the happiest I’ve seen you since you and Haley started having problems. Serious problems. I’m just trying to get a handle on the situation and I’m giving you an out here. I don’t know the woman, but I do know you. I know your team respects you completely, but I’m probably one of the few people in this world who is going to look at this with your best interests in mind.”
He made a very good point and Aaron knew it. He ran a hand through his hair. This could be his one opportunity to lay it all out on the table, the entire relationship from day one. He had to take the opportunity, didn’t he?
“She came to the unit as a replacement for an agent we’d lost.”
“As in died?”
“No. She left the FBI. I don’t think I really recognized her, not that it mattered at the time. Then Haley asked me to leave the BAU.”
“And you almost did,” Sean said, turning back to his cooking, still listening. “I remember that.”
“And Emily quit.”
“Why?”
“Strauss, the department chief, put her on my unit to gather dirt on me. Between Elle’s shooting of a suspect in cold blood and Reid’s drug addiction, not to mention Gideon’s break down, she had a lot to talk about.”
“But she quit.”
“But she quit,” Aaron parroted. “And I knew something was there.”
“On both sides?”
“I still had Haley.”
“But things were falling apart,” Sean reminded him.
Aaron sighed. “No. Emily became… a friend. I trusted her because I knew she’d once tried to give up something she loved so much because she knew how important the BAU was to me.”
“Even if you’ve been there a bit too long,” his younger brother reminded him. “What changed?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron said honestly. “One second she was a fantastic confidante and the next she was always in my head.”
Sean, the corner of his eye on the stove, watched his brother. It wasn’t often Aaron opened up. Life with their parents didn’t exactly breed honesty. Nevertheless, the brothers had developed an unwritten code of sorts and Sean knew that Aaron being honest, sharing the deepest bones of his thoughts was something that he did with very few people. He made a mental note to ask if Emily knew about some of his deepest fears.
“And then she was stabbed.”
“I heard that through the grapevine.” In other words, his mother had been beside herself with perfectly formed grief and called her son.
“She was in the hospital, the one place I never thought I’d ever see her,” Aaron continued, his eyes glazing over as he reflected on those moments. “Emily isn’t one to be weak. She’s a pillar of absolute strength even in the worst of cases, but she looked fragile in that hospital bed. I guess that was when I knew she was more than a friend.”
“Then what happened?” Sean asked, waving a hand in front of Aaron’s face. The last thing Sean wanted was for Aaron to lose himself in dark despair and the way he was going, that was going to be the nasty end.
“The doctors didn’t want her by herself while she healed and she didn’t want to stay with her mother. Plus, I have the spare bedroom...”
“She stayed here,” Sean interrupted. “I get it.”
“For five months. And we didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t?”
“Nothing inappropriate. It was… it was nice. Nice to have someone to come home to for a change, someone who knew the kinds of things I see at work and didn’t ask about them.”
“Someone who understands who you are is largely based on what you do.”
It sounded bad when spoken like that, but Aaron nodded. “I could talk to her about the cases, I could talk to her about the child molesters and perverted sadists and I didn’t feel like I was corrupting a beautiful mind.”
“Because the job had already done it,” Sean agreed. “When did you start the whole relationship part.”
“The day I took her home. She moved back into her apartment the week before her evaluations. I stayed the weekend.”
“Good for you!”
“Not like that,” Aaron said with a roll of his eyes.
“And now…”
“Now we’ve been dating for five months. Jack adores her, I enjoy her company, her intellect…”
“She’s beautiful, you love her, who are you and what the hell have you done with Aaron Hotchner?”
But Aaron couldn’t seem to open his mouth to answer his brother’s question. Love? Really? Was he in love with Emily Prentiss? Love was a big word to attach to emotion, one that was terrifying. He and Emily hadn’t even talked about anything like that. Of course, he admitted that most of the conveying of emotion was done through actions, but that didn’t mean that the other one didn’t understand. They read behaviour for a living and they knew each other’s better than anyone else.
Could he be in love with her after only five months? Ten, his mind whispered to him mutinously. Because really, hadn’t the first five months been essentially the same thing without the physical aspect? Hadn’t they shared the same bed, snuggled during a movie, cooked each other meals and just generally enjoyed each other’s company? And how long had it been that he’d watched her just that little bit closer than the rest of his agents, that he worried about her just that little bit more?
“Suck it up and admit it to yourself. I could see it at Thanksgiving. If it makes you feel any better, she’s head over heels for you too,” Sean offered.
How had he not seen it? Sure, he wasn’t looking for it, but he knew that the most expressive parts of Emily were her face, her eyes and her hands. How had he missed it? He made a mental note to watch for those signs the next time they were together. “Sean-“
“Do you miss her when she’s not around?”
Aaron wasn’t sure he was going to enjoy this particular line of questioning. “Yes.”
“Do you get all protective watching her and Jack?”
Sometimes just watching her in the office and definitely watching her out in the field. “Yes.”
“You already said she understands you better than Haley did, you’ve already said she’d quit for you, so I’d say with that one, she’s already in love with you… You braved the Prentiss shindig at Thanksgiving and I know you hate social engagements with the parents,” Sean listed off. “Do you worry about her all the time?”
“Yes.”
“Even when you know she’s more than capable of taking care of herself?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to sweep her off her feet to some beach resort so you can relax and spend time together? Hypothetically speaking, I guess, since I know you won’t leave work.”
“Neither would she,” Aaron defended.
Sean took that as a ‘yes’. “My tally says love, bro.”
“Your tally’s been inhaling too many spicy fumes,” Aaron returned. His armour had been picked at and now he had a lot to think about.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t open to the idea of loving Emily. On the contrary, it sounded like a perfectly good idea to him. What bothered him was everything that came with loving her. They’d made it through many a-case without a hitch and he knew they’d probably found a pretty good balance, barring any ridiculously terrible cases. And there wasn’t any guarantee that either of them would want to be in the BAU if their relationship took the next step.
It wasn’t an ‘if’. It was a ‘when’. He’d made the decision to count kissing her as an excellent decision with the idea of a future in mind. Not any sort of clear picture that came with love at first sight, but with the murky idea that there would be something waiting there for them if they were willing to take that first big leap. And he’s been handsomely rewarded for making that choice. Emily didn’t hide much of her personality from the team. She was who she was without any sort of flourishes or covered flaws. So there was no worries about getting to know her when he made his leap.
She’d been a little bit slower to do so. Not to confide in him, that would be a useless struggle both because he was a behaviouralist, but also because they were well past that point in their friendship. For her to hide things would be uncharacteristic and more like taking a step backwards than taking one forwards. She had been slightly slower in making that jump. She’d let him spend the weekend “ heck, invited him to spend the weekend - agreed to the date with him, gone on the date with him, and then spilled the beans about not being sure. Eventually she’d made the decision he’d hoped for, but originally, she hadn’t been so sure.
And she’d been the one to bring up the issues with work, with the team, with the cases. He assumed it was her spectacular ability to compartmentalize, to shove her emotional response aside for rationality, though at the time all he’d been concerned with was getting her to agree. They’d lived together, for goodness sakes, he’d held her through nightmares and helped her wash her hair. There wasn’t much they didn’t know about each other by that point. They were in a romantic relationship without the labels. And the kissing. Oh, and the fantastic sex.
But that wasn’t the point. Everything with Emily was always different. Every date, every outing, every moment she spent with Jack he always saw something different. It was an odd concept. Every time he thought he had every nuance of her figured out, she went and did something that poked a hole in the box and he had to re-think his original approach. He liked that about her. He like that a lot.
Then there was the whole Jack thing. Aaron remembered Reid once spouting off information about how men, when they reach a certain time in their lives, look for women who they know are going to be good with children. If that was true, then maybe he was utterly in love with Emily. She watched and nurtured Jack like he was her own child, even though he wasn’t. And Jack had taken to her like a fly to honey because Emily, like Aaron, didn’t believe in lying to him. When he asked about their jobs, she gave him a watered down version of the real answer. And Jack rarely got angry when she told him there were some things he just couldn’t know until he was older. He had the utmost faith that she’d make more than a fantastic mother to some lucky kid someday.
And part of him screamed that he hoped that lucky kid was half him and half her.
“That love thing is looking more and more appealing now, isn’t it?” Sean asked with a knowing smile.
Aaron felt slightly like he’d been sucker punched.