Outward in the Same Direction - 1/3
Fic: Outward in the Same Direction
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Pairing: Emily Prentiss/Spencer Reid
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It’s an oddly quiet, sweet thing that shouldn’t work but does, and she tries not to analyse it any further than the fact that he makes her happier than she’s been in years.
Disclaimer: The characters within are not mine. CBS owns them. I am just treating them nicely for a while.
A/N: This is shamelessly fluffy fluff. Spoilers through seasons two and three, goes off-canon from early season four, for the purposes of getting them together, and because I live in the past with this show.
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
0.
The first time they sleep together, it’s mostly an accident. They’ve just closed a case in Idaho and Prentiss has been matching Morgan drink for drink in the hotel’s bar, while Reid sips slowly at his and JJ sticks to water. Hotch has disappeared into his room, presumably to call Jack and say good night, and Rossi is off doing whatever it is that Rossi does in his spare time.
Morgan calls it a night when he realises that he’s getting much drunker than Prentiss is, and that it isn’t doing his reputation any good. The four make the trek back up to their rooms, Prentiss’s smug swagger at out-drinking Morgan contrasting sweetly with the way JJ now waddles slightly under the weight of her newly-rounded belly.
Morgan bumps his shoulder against Reid’s, in a way that he has come to understand is the bigger man’s way of expressing friendship, and stumbles into his room. JJ laughs and calls good night as she breaks off next. Reid trails along after Prentiss towards the far end of the hall, smiling and giving an awkward wave as she reaches her room.
Something has been building between them, hesitant and slow, since she held his hand on the jet, her face a mess of bruises but smiling at him still. It’s a faint pressure, an undercurrent that runs through all their interactions, but doesn’t get in the way; just exists, bubbling around them. They are two people accustomed to being alone, who don’t trust easily but trust each other, and who have begun falling barely noticing that it’s happening.
The crooked, half-drunken smile she gives him makes his stomach go warm and gives him pause. It isn’t till she’s closed the door behind her and he turns to face his own that he realises that she has part of the case file he was planning on going through before he went to bed.
He sighs and rests his head on the door, then turns back towards Prentiss’s room and gives a halting knock.
“Emily? Uh, I was wondering if you had the witness interviews to go with the unsub’s file? I was going to look over them one more time before-”
The door swings open and Prentiss is standing there with no pants on and Reid quite suddenly loses the ability to speak.
Her legs are long and lean and stronger than they normally look in her dress pants, and the tank top she is wearing rises up over one pale hipbone that he wants fiercely to put his hand on. She quirks the left side of her mouth up at him and leans on the door with one arm, waiting for him to speak, the alcohol in her system making her bold, and she is without a doubt the sexiest thing he’s ever seen.
Reid somehow manages to fumble his way into forming a sentence and Prentiss snorts a laugh at him and tilts her head in an invitation for him to come inside. She disappears into the room’s tiny bathroom and emerges a few seconds later with boxers on, and then crosses to the table where she’s spread the case file out on the surface.
“You know, Reid, this will all still be here in the morning. When it’s daytime, and we’re actually meant to be working.”
He smiles guiltily.
“I know. I just wanted to look over it one more time and organize the interviews while it’s still uh, fresh in my mind.”
From where she’s bent over the table Emily laughs.
“Reid, you have an eidetic memory. Nothing is ever not ‘fresh’ in your mind.”
He can’t come up with a response except to say; “Yeah, well.”
Prentiss laughs again, her hair brushing against his chest while she shifts to gather together all the pieces of paper she’s been grabbing. She straightens up suddenly and turns to hand him the folder but he’s closer than she expected and he’s bent down trying to see over her shoulder, and then their mouths bump together with no warning; off centre and uneven and not even remotely like a real kiss.
He straightens up, fully prepared to laugh awkwardly and brush it off. But when he tries to speak the words get stuck in his throat, and she’s looking at him with this look that women don’t generally have around him. Her pupils are dilated and her cheeks are flushed and his brain is trying to tell him that these are textbook signs of arousal but he can’t quite make that compute.
He opens and closes his mouth, two, three times, and she would laugh if she didn’t somehow find him so adorable. His throat bobs as he swallows, trying to clear his dry throat, and her eyes flicker from his mouth to his eyes and back down again as he stares at her. Then Emily bites her lip and sighs out a breath and leans forward and kisses him.
There have been very few moments in Reid’s life, outside of the influence of narcotics, when his brain has actually failed him. This is one of them. Prentiss pushes her lips against his and wraps her arm around the back of his neck and he just stands there, mouth agape, heart pounding, brain short-circuiting. Her lips are so soft, and her mouth is warm and tastes like scotch, and he realises that he has no idea what he normally does with his hands. Right now they’re just hanging awkwardly at his sides, half raised in mid air, which is blasphemous when a woman this beautiful is pressed up against him. He tries to will his limbs to move, but they refuse to cooperate.
She solves the problem for him when she tugs on the front of his sweater until he trips over his own feet and into her, pressing their bodies together from mouth to toe. The movement shocks him into motion and he finally finds the momentum to move his mouth against hers and bring his hands up to her waist, clutching at her in a way that he’s sure is quite unattractive but can’t make himself stop doing. She moans, low and quiet against his mouth, and he tries to slide his arms around her, as awkward and uncoordinated as only he could be. She laughs softly and pulls her face back from his, their hips bumping together, and her voice is soft and husky.
“Reid? Close the door.”
He is awkward and a little stilted, at first, and she swears she can almost see his mind working through a step-by-step guide of things he's supposed to be doing while she lies on the bed in front of him. He kisses her softly and keeps his hands on the outside of her waist, and she would doubt that he's enjoying himself, except that she knows him; and that she can feel him, hard against the inside of her thigh. She gives him as much time as her patience will allow her, to let him relax, then pushes against his thin chest and rolls him underneath her. (She's never been very good at being patient.)
The aftermath is about as awkward as it normally is for Emily, although much less so than it usually is for Reid. She pulls the sheets up over her chest and smiles tightly when she meets his eye, lying still while she gets her breath back.
Reid for the most part is just kind of stupefied, rendered incapable of movement (and still pretty amazed that he gave Emily Prentiss an orgasm). She takes a deep breath after a while and moves to get up.
“I’m, uh...” she makes a cute arm-wave gesture towards the bathroom as she pulls her top back over her head. It’s the same tank she answered the door in, no more than an hour ago, the grey material clinging to her chest and stomach in a way that makes his breath catch, and it feels oddly like they’ve come full circle.
“You can, um... stay, if you want, or go... or, whatever. I’m just going to go, uh, clean up.”
Her voice rises up at the end as if it’s a question and she scrunches her nose before slipping into the bathroom, aware of his eyes on her as she goes.
Reid sits there awkwardly in the bed, with no idea if that exchange means that she wants him to stay or go. He would usually stay put until whoever he’s with makes the decision for him, because the few times his mother ever talked to him about this kind of situation, she told him to never be the kind of man who leaves first. But being alone in the bed is leaving him floundering without a social cue to follow.
He shifts against the thin hotel sheets, listening to Emily run water in the bathroom, and finally gets nervous enough that he locates his boxers from where she’d tossed them across the room, so at least if she comes back out and asks him why he’s still here, he doesn’t have to get out of the bed naked.
As it is she smiles, kind of pleased and shy, when she comes out of the bathroom and sees him still there. It’s getting so late it’s early again, now, so she climbs back into the bed and turns the light out, making sure that the alarm on her phone is set and sitting on the bedside table. Reid is too uncomfortable with touching to try to snuggle, to borrow a term from Garcia’s vernacular. He’s not sure if he’s even supposed to, anyway, considering Prentiss is lying on the other side of the small bed. He searches through the sheets until he finds her hand, though, smooth and cool in his, and the look she gives him makes him think it was the right move.
...
For about a week, Prentiss kind of freaks out about the whole thing.
She’d never really considered him in a sexual sense before that night. Her compartmentalisation skills make sure that she doesn’t really form sexual feelings towards people she shouldn’t be attracted to, and they are mostly very effective, until they suddenly aren’t.
She has always liked Reid, and has come to care about him, and trust him, and hold him as one of the people close to her heart. He is sweet, and incredibly nerdy, and funny, and loyal, and socially awkward to extremes that even she can’t manage. Emily feels a sort of a kinship with him that she doesn’t feel with many people, like they’re cut from the same cloth. She has gone through most of her life largely unconnected to other people; surrounded by them, well-versed in their nature, but separate from them all the same. She doesn’t feel that sense of distance with Reid, possibly because he is exactly the same, and it’s one of the things that makes her feel so comfortable around him.
She realizes after that night that all these little things she knows about Reid have somehow added up to a whole sense of a person she is entirely attached to.
She just can’t get past the fact that it’s so inappropriate. For all her poor choices with men, she never sleeps with people from work; not to mention his age, oh my god, his age. She’s almost old enough to be his biological mother; a thought which is not even that improbable considering her own sordid youth. But that night they’d been talking and flirting and joking around in the bar, enjoying the high that comes with closing a case without any additional casualties, and he’d been so adorably awkward and Reid-like, standing in her hotel room, his cheeks going red.
When she’d turned and their lips had touched she’d been caught off guard by the pleasant feeling that raced through her chest; and standing there looking at his face so close to hers, so familiar and safe and dear to her, she’d given in to impulse and kissed him properly.
She’d discovered that once she’d kissed him she couldn’t not do it again, and again, and longer and deeper, until they were both naked and she wanted him so much it was too late to go back. He’d felt wonderful, all warm skin and bony limbs pressed against her, soft hair and soft touches and soft smiles as he kissed her. He was actually not bad in bed, despite all his self-deprecation; sweet and earnest and attentive, and really great with his hands.
She can’t get the look on his face as he pushed into her for the first time out of her head; stunned and awed and amazed, his mouth forming a perfect silent ‘o’ as he stared at her, his hair falling forward across his eyes. She can’t stop seeing it when she looks at him at work, when he’s speaking in a briefing, when he brushes his lovely hair back off his forehead, fifty times a day. Needless to say, it’s incredibly distracting.
She knows she’s acting weird with him, but she can’t seem to make herself stop. The kicker is that she knows if she didn’t like him, this would all be so much easier; she could tell him that it was just a one-time thing, no big deal, just a tension-relief between friends. And she knows that because he respects her (and because he lacks confidence and doesn’t believe himself worthy of sexual attention) he would say: “Yeah, sure, of course, Emily”, and they could pretend it never happened.
Except that she really, kind of... likes him. And wants him to know that she likes him. And wants him to know that she wants to have sex with him, and wants to be around him. Because she knows him, and she knows that no-one’s ever really made him feel like that before.
She wants from somewhere deep in her chest to be the one who gives him that.
Reid spends the entire week trying very hard to not act weird, which, of course, only serves to make him act even weirder than usual, but he’s pretty sure that Emily hasn’t noticed that it’s directly related to her. He spends ninety percent of his time at work now staring at her. When they’re in briefings he watches her out of the corner of his eye, waiting for her to find something in the morbid details JJ is giving them that draws her interest enough to make her speak. She has perfect, sharp, white teeth and her speech lilts with careful enunciation born of high breeding. He loves watching her talk.
The rest of his time is spent desperately hoping for and being terrified of being left alone with her. He'd be lying if he said that he'd never thought about it before, throught about her before. But until now he's always been able to push those flights of fancy into the compartment in his brain reserved for things that are never going to happen, and he'd been perfectly okay with that. Now that it's happened, he finds himself failing to press those things down to that place where they won't get to him anymore; can't stop remembering how good she'd felt, the way she smiled at him in between worn-out hotel sheets.
In trying to act like nothing’s changed, he makes himself very aware that everything has. She smiles at him on a Tuesday and, irrational as he knows it is, he feels like he might be going into cardiac arrest.
…
Two weeks in she decides that if she likes someone and connects with them as much as she does with Reid, she's damn well going to keep them around. She reasons that she barely ever puts her own desires over the job, over doing what's right, and she deserves to have this one thing for herself.
In the back of her mind she marvels at her ability to rationalize selfishness and greed into righteous indignation. If she were to be honest with herself, she would admit that a lot of her decision is based on the fact that she’s just so tired of being alone.
She corners him after work, picking her left thumbnail to shreds as she waits for him to come out of the building. When he eventually emerges, his cardigan pulled lopsidedly over his chest, messenger bag slung over one shoulder, she pounces, jogging to catch up with him, and tells him they should go get dinner.
When it comes out as more of a demand than an offer, she quickly adds: "Or, something."
He crooks an eyebrow at her and questions: “Something?”
She rolls her eyes and shifts on her heels.
“Yeah, you know... dinner, coffee, sex, any... combination of the above.” She fumbles after ‘sex’ like a twelve year old, rapidly losing confidence as he stares at her, silent, mouth gaping like a fish.
“I, uh... You... you want to have sex with me again?” He finally stammers, dumbfounded, and she wishes the ground would just swallow her whole.
“Um.” She shuffles again and runs her hand through her hair and looks at her feet, the wall, a spot over his shoulder. Anywhere but at him.
“Well... I just thought, if you, you know... wanted.”
It’s the most awkward conversation they’ve ever had, which is an accomplishment in and of itself, considering that they both have a natural propensity for making everything more awkward than it needs to be.
She exhales, long and slow, and considers turning and running away. But she can’t shake this feeling she gets whenever he’s around, like she just wants to stop whatever she’s doing and smile, and certainly that’s something worth going after, isn’t it?
Prentiss looks up at him, his face lit in neon by a flickering lamp above their heads, and sternly tells herself to stop being ridiculous. She’s a grown woman, propositioning a grown man she’s attracted to, and there is absolutely no reason to be awkward.
“Look, Reid, I like you. I had fun, the other week. And I enjoy spending time with you. So, if you want to, maybe we could just... ignore what a bad idea this is and... spend some time together and see what happens.”
It takes him a few tries to get his mouth working, and when he speaks his voice is choked and hesitant.
“I’d- I’d like that a lot, Emily.”
She exhales and nods decisively.
"Okay, good. Good."
They go to an all-night diner near his apartment and drink bad coffee and talk awkwardly about obscure psychological theories while the other customers shoot them weird looks. An hour later she climbs into his lap on his tiny, cheap mattress and kisses him like she wants him desperately. They lose their clothes so fast he barely gets a chance to feel self-conscious before she’s rolling the condom on and sliding down on him, and he discovers he’s never liked his last name so much as when she moans it as she breaks apart around him.
…
1.
At the start of their first month together, Emily lays some ground rules. That they won’t let this interfere with their jobs is a given. That this isn’t going to be a relationship is kind of a surprise to Reid. She talks about needing this to stay something that’s casual, and relaxed, and in-between all the other parts of their lives, that won’t end up getting in the way, or end with getting someone hurt, or fired.
Prentiss really likes him, and likes the way he makes her feel. She likes the time they spend together, and doesn’t want to stop. But at the same time she can feel the weight of expectation pressing down on her, and the thought of this being a proper, grown-up Relationship is something that makes her tired just to think about. The way he looks at her, all soft, adoring eyes, makes her trust issues swell in her chest, and she knows if she lets herself go there too fast, especially with Reid, who hasn’t had a real, long-term romantic relationship before in his life, she’s only going to wind up being disappointed when it falls apart.
Reid hasn’t really had enough long-term experience to know how he even feels about what Emily’s suggesting. Although he’s pretty sure he feels more for her than can be contained by ‘just casual’, he also knows he doesn’t deserve this, so he’ll keep quiet if he gets to keep her. They’re very similar, in that way; neither of them have ever really known their own value. Despite his mother and because of hers they were raised to feel unimportant, and less than they really are, so neither of them has ever really learned to be comfortable in asking for what they want. The BAU is the only thing either of them has ever felt absolute confidence in; in their abilities, the skills of their job, the strength of their team. He believes her when she says that getting too seriously, emotionally involved would threaten all of that. Besides, without much to compare it to, how is he to know that this isn’t just the kind of emotional response you’re meant to have when you’re sleeping with a woman you get along with?
He’s had sex with Emily now more times than any other woman he’s ever been with. He feels cliched even thinking it, but he’d honestly never known that sex could be this good. It’s not like he was a virgin when he met her, and it’s not like he was even hideously inexperienced. He wasn’t. But he’s never really understood the huge deal that other men make over sex, had always just assumed it was something that was over-exaggerated in the media, talked-up by men like Morgan who could get any woman in the world to sleep with them. Sex with Emily, however, is made of some kind of amazing that he can’t even believe he gets to experience on a regular basis. She seems to really like having sex with him, too, which is giving him a weird sort of confidence he doesn’t really know what to do with.
He feels better in himself than he has in a long time, since before Tobias Hankle, before the Dilaudid, before all the things he’s seen and the things that have hit him, on the job and off. He decides that letting this progress like it is, lightweight and low-pressure and easy, is probably the best thing for him right now, too.
…
2.
Within the second month they settle into a routine, aided by years of knowing each other and understanding the demands of their job. They spend most of their free time at his place, which baffles him at first, because hers is much bigger. She loves his apartment, loves how it suits him perfectly, loves that it’s tiny and cosy and kitschy. Her apartment still feels as impersonal as the day she moved in, and she likes how clearly his personality is imprinted on his.
The first time she stays over he hadn’t been prepared for it to happen, and, as a result, had forgotten that he’d left patterned solar system sheets on the bed. She’d laughed so hard her stomach had cramped viciously and she’d had to spend several minutes laughing and trying to breathe through the stitch while Reid’s face got redder and redder.
When she’d finally stopped laughing she’d wheezed; “Oh my god, Reid, you’re such a dork.”
He would have bolted if not for the way that her smile was happy and open and not in the least bit malicious, and the fact that she was getting naked under the sheets anyway, pale skin against the black cotton sky, dark hair spread across the stars.
They spend hours together watching Star Trek re-runs and eating Chinese take-out straight out of the box, and having sex with their hands clamped over each others mouths, because she moans so loudly when he touches her just right and he gasps whenever she does, well, anything, and his neighbour is 72 years old but has the hearing of a bat and won’t hesitate to yell at them through the walls if they dare make too much noise. Reid teaches her something that she’s learned to forget over the years, in how wonderful it feels just to have another person around, even when they aren’t doing anything but letting themselves be preoccupied with the mundane proceedings of the day. Emily teaches him how great it is to stay in bed all day when you have nothing to do, just to sleep far later than you need to, and talk about irrelevant things, and doze off at midday, and be woken with kisses on the side of his neck.
They’ve both always been solitary people and it surprises them that they can spend so much time together without it being overbearing. They make each other happy, and they make each other laugh, which is something neither of them have had enough of in their lives.
At work they shoot each other sideways smiles and half-hidden glances, interactions coming easier, but not really any different than they used to be on their happier days. JJ comments on their new-found friendliness and Prentiss just shrugs and tells her that they’ve started talking more, after Cyrus, and have gotten closer. It’s an effortless lie mixed with half-truths and JJ smiles and says “Oh, that’s really nice” and doesn’t think anything more of it.
Reid is always amazed at how well Emily can lie, when it’s needed, and endeared by how much she dislikes lying when it’s not.
She doesn’t seem to mind this kind of lie, though. Spending the majority of one’s time in a group of profilers, so close together they get claustrophobic from each others’ presence, they have all become accustomed to never having anything that’s private or sacred. But this thing they have is theirs, and only theirs, and they both discover that it’s really, unexpectedly fun to have this secret between them, kept from the rest of the team. Everything has hidden meanings and a lovely unseen tension to it, and it’s more than enough to sustain them through the long days of cases and paperwork until they find small stretches of time between working hours when they can be alone.
At the end of the day they leave at different times, and then, three, four, sometimes five nights a week, they’ll find their way to each other.
Once he comes home after a meeting with Hotch that went over-time and she is already inside, spread out on his bed in her underwear.
Several times, she comes home to find him fumbling take-out packages in her hallway, trying to fake nonchalance.
Most often, she knocks on his door in the dark and greets him with a kiss.
It’s an oddly quiet, sweet thing that shouldn’t work but does, and she tries not to analyse it any further than the fact that he makes her happier than she’s been in years.
...
3.
In their third month he takes her to a midnight Star Wars movie marathon because he has discovered, in attempting to carefully test the waters in regards to how far her nerdiness stretches, that she is an even bigger fan than he is. He is delighted by her geekish nature, over things he likes and things he doesn’t, because he’s never dated someone who actually wanted to spend an hour arguing over the structural integrity of the Millennium Falcon versus the Enterprise with him and who can spend ten minutes talking animatedly about French new wave cinema themes, only to blush and joke that she’s pulling a Reid when she realises that she’s been babbling on about something he couldn’t care less about.
They buy two huge buckets of popcorn, because as romantic as sharing is supposed to be, they are both serious about their junk food. Prentiss downs her coke in under ten minutes and is jiggling her leg from the need to pee less than halfway in to A New Hope. She doesn’t even consider leaving her seat till the movie is over, though, and he admires that. She is calmer when she comes back into the theatre during the first intermission, smiling shyly at him and stretching her legs out in front of her seat as the other patrons come and go in preparation for the next film. When Empire starts he reaches over and takes her hand, awkward and stiff till she grins at him in the dark and molds their palms together, shifting so they’re sharing the arm rest. They separate in the next intermission, stretching and visiting the bathrooms again, and when the final film starts she forgoes hand-holding, pushing the arm rest up and leaning against his side instead. He spares a moment to consider the fact that there were probably couples doing this, during this movie, possibly in this exact theatre, while he was still in diapers.
It’s a nice thought. It makes him feel so normal, somehow, like he fits in to the world for once.
Emily clutches his arm tighter during the good parts and laughs in the funny parts and swoons whenever Han is being rough and heroic and laughs when the scene with Leia’s famous gold bikini comes on and Reid gazes at the screen, lusting and adoring.
By the time they leave the cinema it’s after six am, and they’re both fuzzy and scratchy and sleep-deprived and running mainly on sugar. She slides her arm through his in the parking lot and tucks herself into his bony side as they walk to the car, fighting over which of the three is the superior movie.
Even with all the things he's been through, Reid somehow maintains a general geekish wonder about life. When he's focusing on something outside of himself, like her, or Star Wars, for instance, he is positive and sweet, and something she would call innocent if she didn't know so well that he was not. It's a lovely counterpoint to her cynicism that's starting to rub off on her, and she can't remember the last time she felt so content and relaxed about life in general.
They go back to her place and collapse in her huge, soft bed to sleep half the day away. She wakes up before him and stays still, comfortable where she is, lying on her side facing him and watching his face while he sleeps. She’s close enough that she can see all the little lines in the middle of his forehead and around the corner of his eyes, markers that come from nearly thirty years of frowning, concentrating, squinting at things; from journals to novels to human beings.
In sleep he looks older, which she is thankful for, because if he were to look any younger than he already does it might get a bit disconcerting to wake up next to him. Lying next to her, his face is wrinkled and stubbly, and his hair is all over the place. He smells warm and sleepy and wonderful.
She is well aware that these are not casual, low-pressure feelings, but chooses to shove those thoughts down somewhere where she can obsess over them later.
Instead she reaches a finger out and strokes it down the length of his nose, laughing as he snorts and wakes, blinking long, light eyelashes against his cheeks. He presses his lips together and they spring apart flushed pink, pulls the corner of his mouth up to smile at her. She takes a moment to soak in how sexy he is, all ruffled from sleep, then slides her bare leg slowly across his. She starts kissing her way down his cheek and neck and he stirs, bringing his hands up to bury them in her hair, pulling her mouth up to his to kiss her back with a sleepy, rough enthusiasm that turns her on so much coming from him.
He runs his fingers slowly up her sides and she shivers, trails them along the sides of her breasts and she feels fifteen again, breathless and wanting, when feeling a boy’s hand under her shirt was thrilling and new. He rolls himself on top of her and presses her down into the mattress, sharp hipbones digging in to the soft skin of her thighs, and it should hurt, but it’s become so familiar and so him she doesn’t even mind. His kisses are hard and intense and immediate, and he barely ever closes his eyes, watching her cheek and eyelashes dance out of focus as she kisses him back.
…
4.
Four months in they catch a really bad case, even by their standards, and Prentiss sags under the weight of it. There’s a group of highly organised male unsubs in Houston, kidnapping girls and keeping them for months in their own private torture chamber, and then releasing the girls, alive, but so completely ruined by what they’ve been through that they can barely even give the police their own names, let alone help them find their abusers. By the time the BAU is called in there have been four victims, that the police know about; two have killed themselves long before the plane even touches down, one has been taken into full-time psychiatric care and won’t speak, and the other just sits and cries, quietly, while Emily tries to question her.
She spends hours with the girl, forgoing fieldwork, interviews, conferences with the rest of the team, just trying to get her to warm to her, to feel safer, to stop crying, if nothing else. By the time she is asked to leave the hospital she has nothing to show for her efforts but nail marks in the palm of her hand from where the girl had clutched her tight enough to break the skin.
When she gets back to the hotel she is composed and professional while she fills Hotch in. After they say goodnight, Emily goes straight to Reid’s room instead of her own, rousing him from sleep and crawling into his bed. She presses her face into his neck, where it smells most like him, warm and clean, like washing powder and coffee, the stale air of the jet and his skin. She breathes deeply and lays perfectly still.
They don’t usually see each other while they’re on cases, though they deliberately haven’t made a rule against it, because they both have less than stellar histories when it comes to obeying the rules. But they have agreed that they shouldn’t, because it’s unprofessional, because they might get caught, and because it feels like a betrayal to the rest of the team.
She knows she’s being unfair to him, treating him so inconsistently, demanding casual and care-free and separate from their jobs and then coming to him in the middle of the night when they’re on a case because she’s so sad and dark inside and her resolve is wearing so very thin. She feels selfish and guilty but he welcomes her with open arms and kisses the top of her head and she can’t bring herself to leave.
Reid is the perfect person to come to in times like this. He is all too familiar with darkness and despair, so he is a good companion when someone else is knee-deep in it. He knows how to be quiet - and even when he doesn’t, she finds his rambling, long, tangential speeches oddly soothing, and always has. They are both subdued in their sadness, not loud and angry, like Morgan, or violent and brooding, like Hotch, and he relaxes her even without knowing he’s doing it. His arms are long and warm and wrap around her waist and she turns her body so her face is mostly hidden between his head and the pillow and just breathes.
She’s too wrecked to cry, too shattered to talk, so she just lies there and lets him stroke his hand along her back until she passes out.
…
Part 2
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Pairing: Emily Prentiss/Spencer Reid
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It’s an oddly quiet, sweet thing that shouldn’t work but does, and she tries not to analyse it any further than the fact that he makes her happier than she’s been in years.
Disclaimer: The characters within are not mine. CBS owns them. I am just treating them nicely for a while.
A/N: This is shamelessly fluffy fluff. Spoilers through seasons two and three, goes off-canon from early season four, for the purposes of getting them together, and because I live in the past with this show.
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
0.
The first time they sleep together, it’s mostly an accident. They’ve just closed a case in Idaho and Prentiss has been matching Morgan drink for drink in the hotel’s bar, while Reid sips slowly at his and JJ sticks to water. Hotch has disappeared into his room, presumably to call Jack and say good night, and Rossi is off doing whatever it is that Rossi does in his spare time.
Morgan calls it a night when he realises that he’s getting much drunker than Prentiss is, and that it isn’t doing his reputation any good. The four make the trek back up to their rooms, Prentiss’s smug swagger at out-drinking Morgan contrasting sweetly with the way JJ now waddles slightly under the weight of her newly-rounded belly.
Morgan bumps his shoulder against Reid’s, in a way that he has come to understand is the bigger man’s way of expressing friendship, and stumbles into his room. JJ laughs and calls good night as she breaks off next. Reid trails along after Prentiss towards the far end of the hall, smiling and giving an awkward wave as she reaches her room.
Something has been building between them, hesitant and slow, since she held his hand on the jet, her face a mess of bruises but smiling at him still. It’s a faint pressure, an undercurrent that runs through all their interactions, but doesn’t get in the way; just exists, bubbling around them. They are two people accustomed to being alone, who don’t trust easily but trust each other, and who have begun falling barely noticing that it’s happening.
The crooked, half-drunken smile she gives him makes his stomach go warm and gives him pause. It isn’t till she’s closed the door behind her and he turns to face his own that he realises that she has part of the case file he was planning on going through before he went to bed.
He sighs and rests his head on the door, then turns back towards Prentiss’s room and gives a halting knock.
“Emily? Uh, I was wondering if you had the witness interviews to go with the unsub’s file? I was going to look over them one more time before-”
The door swings open and Prentiss is standing there with no pants on and Reid quite suddenly loses the ability to speak.
Her legs are long and lean and stronger than they normally look in her dress pants, and the tank top she is wearing rises up over one pale hipbone that he wants fiercely to put his hand on. She quirks the left side of her mouth up at him and leans on the door with one arm, waiting for him to speak, the alcohol in her system making her bold, and she is without a doubt the sexiest thing he’s ever seen.
Reid somehow manages to fumble his way into forming a sentence and Prentiss snorts a laugh at him and tilts her head in an invitation for him to come inside. She disappears into the room’s tiny bathroom and emerges a few seconds later with boxers on, and then crosses to the table where she’s spread the case file out on the surface.
“You know, Reid, this will all still be here in the morning. When it’s daytime, and we’re actually meant to be working.”
He smiles guiltily.
“I know. I just wanted to look over it one more time and organize the interviews while it’s still uh, fresh in my mind.”
From where she’s bent over the table Emily laughs.
“Reid, you have an eidetic memory. Nothing is ever not ‘fresh’ in your mind.”
He can’t come up with a response except to say; “Yeah, well.”
Prentiss laughs again, her hair brushing against his chest while she shifts to gather together all the pieces of paper she’s been grabbing. She straightens up suddenly and turns to hand him the folder but he’s closer than she expected and he’s bent down trying to see over her shoulder, and then their mouths bump together with no warning; off centre and uneven and not even remotely like a real kiss.
He straightens up, fully prepared to laugh awkwardly and brush it off. But when he tries to speak the words get stuck in his throat, and she’s looking at him with this look that women don’t generally have around him. Her pupils are dilated and her cheeks are flushed and his brain is trying to tell him that these are textbook signs of arousal but he can’t quite make that compute.
He opens and closes his mouth, two, three times, and she would laugh if she didn’t somehow find him so adorable. His throat bobs as he swallows, trying to clear his dry throat, and her eyes flicker from his mouth to his eyes and back down again as he stares at her. Then Emily bites her lip and sighs out a breath and leans forward and kisses him.
There have been very few moments in Reid’s life, outside of the influence of narcotics, when his brain has actually failed him. This is one of them. Prentiss pushes her lips against his and wraps her arm around the back of his neck and he just stands there, mouth agape, heart pounding, brain short-circuiting. Her lips are so soft, and her mouth is warm and tastes like scotch, and he realises that he has no idea what he normally does with his hands. Right now they’re just hanging awkwardly at his sides, half raised in mid air, which is blasphemous when a woman this beautiful is pressed up against him. He tries to will his limbs to move, but they refuse to cooperate.
She solves the problem for him when she tugs on the front of his sweater until he trips over his own feet and into her, pressing their bodies together from mouth to toe. The movement shocks him into motion and he finally finds the momentum to move his mouth against hers and bring his hands up to her waist, clutching at her in a way that he’s sure is quite unattractive but can’t make himself stop doing. She moans, low and quiet against his mouth, and he tries to slide his arms around her, as awkward and uncoordinated as only he could be. She laughs softly and pulls her face back from his, their hips bumping together, and her voice is soft and husky.
“Reid? Close the door.”
He is awkward and a little stilted, at first, and she swears she can almost see his mind working through a step-by-step guide of things he's supposed to be doing while she lies on the bed in front of him. He kisses her softly and keeps his hands on the outside of her waist, and she would doubt that he's enjoying himself, except that she knows him; and that she can feel him, hard against the inside of her thigh. She gives him as much time as her patience will allow her, to let him relax, then pushes against his thin chest and rolls him underneath her. (She's never been very good at being patient.)
The aftermath is about as awkward as it normally is for Emily, although much less so than it usually is for Reid. She pulls the sheets up over her chest and smiles tightly when she meets his eye, lying still while she gets her breath back.
Reid for the most part is just kind of stupefied, rendered incapable of movement (and still pretty amazed that he gave Emily Prentiss an orgasm). She takes a deep breath after a while and moves to get up.
“I’m, uh...” she makes a cute arm-wave gesture towards the bathroom as she pulls her top back over her head. It’s the same tank she answered the door in, no more than an hour ago, the grey material clinging to her chest and stomach in a way that makes his breath catch, and it feels oddly like they’ve come full circle.
“You can, um... stay, if you want, or go... or, whatever. I’m just going to go, uh, clean up.”
Her voice rises up at the end as if it’s a question and she scrunches her nose before slipping into the bathroom, aware of his eyes on her as she goes.
Reid sits there awkwardly in the bed, with no idea if that exchange means that she wants him to stay or go. He would usually stay put until whoever he’s with makes the decision for him, because the few times his mother ever talked to him about this kind of situation, she told him to never be the kind of man who leaves first. But being alone in the bed is leaving him floundering without a social cue to follow.
He shifts against the thin hotel sheets, listening to Emily run water in the bathroom, and finally gets nervous enough that he locates his boxers from where she’d tossed them across the room, so at least if she comes back out and asks him why he’s still here, he doesn’t have to get out of the bed naked.
As it is she smiles, kind of pleased and shy, when she comes out of the bathroom and sees him still there. It’s getting so late it’s early again, now, so she climbs back into the bed and turns the light out, making sure that the alarm on her phone is set and sitting on the bedside table. Reid is too uncomfortable with touching to try to snuggle, to borrow a term from Garcia’s vernacular. He’s not sure if he’s even supposed to, anyway, considering Prentiss is lying on the other side of the small bed. He searches through the sheets until he finds her hand, though, smooth and cool in his, and the look she gives him makes him think it was the right move.
...
For about a week, Prentiss kind of freaks out about the whole thing.
She’d never really considered him in a sexual sense before that night. Her compartmentalisation skills make sure that she doesn’t really form sexual feelings towards people she shouldn’t be attracted to, and they are mostly very effective, until they suddenly aren’t.
She has always liked Reid, and has come to care about him, and trust him, and hold him as one of the people close to her heart. He is sweet, and incredibly nerdy, and funny, and loyal, and socially awkward to extremes that even she can’t manage. Emily feels a sort of a kinship with him that she doesn’t feel with many people, like they’re cut from the same cloth. She has gone through most of her life largely unconnected to other people; surrounded by them, well-versed in their nature, but separate from them all the same. She doesn’t feel that sense of distance with Reid, possibly because he is exactly the same, and it’s one of the things that makes her feel so comfortable around him.
She realizes after that night that all these little things she knows about Reid have somehow added up to a whole sense of a person she is entirely attached to.
She just can’t get past the fact that it’s so inappropriate. For all her poor choices with men, she never sleeps with people from work; not to mention his age, oh my god, his age. She’s almost old enough to be his biological mother; a thought which is not even that improbable considering her own sordid youth. But that night they’d been talking and flirting and joking around in the bar, enjoying the high that comes with closing a case without any additional casualties, and he’d been so adorably awkward and Reid-like, standing in her hotel room, his cheeks going red.
When she’d turned and their lips had touched she’d been caught off guard by the pleasant feeling that raced through her chest; and standing there looking at his face so close to hers, so familiar and safe and dear to her, she’d given in to impulse and kissed him properly.
She’d discovered that once she’d kissed him she couldn’t not do it again, and again, and longer and deeper, until they were both naked and she wanted him so much it was too late to go back. He’d felt wonderful, all warm skin and bony limbs pressed against her, soft hair and soft touches and soft smiles as he kissed her. He was actually not bad in bed, despite all his self-deprecation; sweet and earnest and attentive, and really great with his hands.
She can’t get the look on his face as he pushed into her for the first time out of her head; stunned and awed and amazed, his mouth forming a perfect silent ‘o’ as he stared at her, his hair falling forward across his eyes. She can’t stop seeing it when she looks at him at work, when he’s speaking in a briefing, when he brushes his lovely hair back off his forehead, fifty times a day. Needless to say, it’s incredibly distracting.
She knows she’s acting weird with him, but she can’t seem to make herself stop. The kicker is that she knows if she didn’t like him, this would all be so much easier; she could tell him that it was just a one-time thing, no big deal, just a tension-relief between friends. And she knows that because he respects her (and because he lacks confidence and doesn’t believe himself worthy of sexual attention) he would say: “Yeah, sure, of course, Emily”, and they could pretend it never happened.
Except that she really, kind of... likes him. And wants him to know that she likes him. And wants him to know that she wants to have sex with him, and wants to be around him. Because she knows him, and she knows that no-one’s ever really made him feel like that before.
She wants from somewhere deep in her chest to be the one who gives him that.
Reid spends the entire week trying very hard to not act weird, which, of course, only serves to make him act even weirder than usual, but he’s pretty sure that Emily hasn’t noticed that it’s directly related to her. He spends ninety percent of his time at work now staring at her. When they’re in briefings he watches her out of the corner of his eye, waiting for her to find something in the morbid details JJ is giving them that draws her interest enough to make her speak. She has perfect, sharp, white teeth and her speech lilts with careful enunciation born of high breeding. He loves watching her talk.
The rest of his time is spent desperately hoping for and being terrified of being left alone with her. He'd be lying if he said that he'd never thought about it before, throught about her before. But until now he's always been able to push those flights of fancy into the compartment in his brain reserved for things that are never going to happen, and he'd been perfectly okay with that. Now that it's happened, he finds himself failing to press those things down to that place where they won't get to him anymore; can't stop remembering how good she'd felt, the way she smiled at him in between worn-out hotel sheets.
In trying to act like nothing’s changed, he makes himself very aware that everything has. She smiles at him on a Tuesday and, irrational as he knows it is, he feels like he might be going into cardiac arrest.
…
Two weeks in she decides that if she likes someone and connects with them as much as she does with Reid, she's damn well going to keep them around. She reasons that she barely ever puts her own desires over the job, over doing what's right, and she deserves to have this one thing for herself.
In the back of her mind she marvels at her ability to rationalize selfishness and greed into righteous indignation. If she were to be honest with herself, she would admit that a lot of her decision is based on the fact that she’s just so tired of being alone.
She corners him after work, picking her left thumbnail to shreds as she waits for him to come out of the building. When he eventually emerges, his cardigan pulled lopsidedly over his chest, messenger bag slung over one shoulder, she pounces, jogging to catch up with him, and tells him they should go get dinner.
When it comes out as more of a demand than an offer, she quickly adds: "Or, something."
He crooks an eyebrow at her and questions: “Something?”
She rolls her eyes and shifts on her heels.
“Yeah, you know... dinner, coffee, sex, any... combination of the above.” She fumbles after ‘sex’ like a twelve year old, rapidly losing confidence as he stares at her, silent, mouth gaping like a fish.
“I, uh... You... you want to have sex with me again?” He finally stammers, dumbfounded, and she wishes the ground would just swallow her whole.
“Um.” She shuffles again and runs her hand through her hair and looks at her feet, the wall, a spot over his shoulder. Anywhere but at him.
“Well... I just thought, if you, you know... wanted.”
It’s the most awkward conversation they’ve ever had, which is an accomplishment in and of itself, considering that they both have a natural propensity for making everything more awkward than it needs to be.
She exhales, long and slow, and considers turning and running away. But she can’t shake this feeling she gets whenever he’s around, like she just wants to stop whatever she’s doing and smile, and certainly that’s something worth going after, isn’t it?
Prentiss looks up at him, his face lit in neon by a flickering lamp above their heads, and sternly tells herself to stop being ridiculous. She’s a grown woman, propositioning a grown man she’s attracted to, and there is absolutely no reason to be awkward.
“Look, Reid, I like you. I had fun, the other week. And I enjoy spending time with you. So, if you want to, maybe we could just... ignore what a bad idea this is and... spend some time together and see what happens.”
It takes him a few tries to get his mouth working, and when he speaks his voice is choked and hesitant.
“I’d- I’d like that a lot, Emily.”
She exhales and nods decisively.
"Okay, good. Good."
They go to an all-night diner near his apartment and drink bad coffee and talk awkwardly about obscure psychological theories while the other customers shoot them weird looks. An hour later she climbs into his lap on his tiny, cheap mattress and kisses him like she wants him desperately. They lose their clothes so fast he barely gets a chance to feel self-conscious before she’s rolling the condom on and sliding down on him, and he discovers he’s never liked his last name so much as when she moans it as she breaks apart around him.
…
1.
At the start of their first month together, Emily lays some ground rules. That they won’t let this interfere with their jobs is a given. That this isn’t going to be a relationship is kind of a surprise to Reid. She talks about needing this to stay something that’s casual, and relaxed, and in-between all the other parts of their lives, that won’t end up getting in the way, or end with getting someone hurt, or fired.
Prentiss really likes him, and likes the way he makes her feel. She likes the time they spend together, and doesn’t want to stop. But at the same time she can feel the weight of expectation pressing down on her, and the thought of this being a proper, grown-up Relationship is something that makes her tired just to think about. The way he looks at her, all soft, adoring eyes, makes her trust issues swell in her chest, and she knows if she lets herself go there too fast, especially with Reid, who hasn’t had a real, long-term romantic relationship before in his life, she’s only going to wind up being disappointed when it falls apart.
Reid hasn’t really had enough long-term experience to know how he even feels about what Emily’s suggesting. Although he’s pretty sure he feels more for her than can be contained by ‘just casual’, he also knows he doesn’t deserve this, so he’ll keep quiet if he gets to keep her. They’re very similar, in that way; neither of them have ever really known their own value. Despite his mother and because of hers they were raised to feel unimportant, and less than they really are, so neither of them has ever really learned to be comfortable in asking for what they want. The BAU is the only thing either of them has ever felt absolute confidence in; in their abilities, the skills of their job, the strength of their team. He believes her when she says that getting too seriously, emotionally involved would threaten all of that. Besides, without much to compare it to, how is he to know that this isn’t just the kind of emotional response you’re meant to have when you’re sleeping with a woman you get along with?
He’s had sex with Emily now more times than any other woman he’s ever been with. He feels cliched even thinking it, but he’d honestly never known that sex could be this good. It’s not like he was a virgin when he met her, and it’s not like he was even hideously inexperienced. He wasn’t. But he’s never really understood the huge deal that other men make over sex, had always just assumed it was something that was over-exaggerated in the media, talked-up by men like Morgan who could get any woman in the world to sleep with them. Sex with Emily, however, is made of some kind of amazing that he can’t even believe he gets to experience on a regular basis. She seems to really like having sex with him, too, which is giving him a weird sort of confidence he doesn’t really know what to do with.
He feels better in himself than he has in a long time, since before Tobias Hankle, before the Dilaudid, before all the things he’s seen and the things that have hit him, on the job and off. He decides that letting this progress like it is, lightweight and low-pressure and easy, is probably the best thing for him right now, too.
…
2.
Within the second month they settle into a routine, aided by years of knowing each other and understanding the demands of their job. They spend most of their free time at his place, which baffles him at first, because hers is much bigger. She loves his apartment, loves how it suits him perfectly, loves that it’s tiny and cosy and kitschy. Her apartment still feels as impersonal as the day she moved in, and she likes how clearly his personality is imprinted on his.
The first time she stays over he hadn’t been prepared for it to happen, and, as a result, had forgotten that he’d left patterned solar system sheets on the bed. She’d laughed so hard her stomach had cramped viciously and she’d had to spend several minutes laughing and trying to breathe through the stitch while Reid’s face got redder and redder.
When she’d finally stopped laughing she’d wheezed; “Oh my god, Reid, you’re such a dork.”
He would have bolted if not for the way that her smile was happy and open and not in the least bit malicious, and the fact that she was getting naked under the sheets anyway, pale skin against the black cotton sky, dark hair spread across the stars.
They spend hours together watching Star Trek re-runs and eating Chinese take-out straight out of the box, and having sex with their hands clamped over each others mouths, because she moans so loudly when he touches her just right and he gasps whenever she does, well, anything, and his neighbour is 72 years old but has the hearing of a bat and won’t hesitate to yell at them through the walls if they dare make too much noise. Reid teaches her something that she’s learned to forget over the years, in how wonderful it feels just to have another person around, even when they aren’t doing anything but letting themselves be preoccupied with the mundane proceedings of the day. Emily teaches him how great it is to stay in bed all day when you have nothing to do, just to sleep far later than you need to, and talk about irrelevant things, and doze off at midday, and be woken with kisses on the side of his neck.
They’ve both always been solitary people and it surprises them that they can spend so much time together without it being overbearing. They make each other happy, and they make each other laugh, which is something neither of them have had enough of in their lives.
At work they shoot each other sideways smiles and half-hidden glances, interactions coming easier, but not really any different than they used to be on their happier days. JJ comments on their new-found friendliness and Prentiss just shrugs and tells her that they’ve started talking more, after Cyrus, and have gotten closer. It’s an effortless lie mixed with half-truths and JJ smiles and says “Oh, that’s really nice” and doesn’t think anything more of it.
Reid is always amazed at how well Emily can lie, when it’s needed, and endeared by how much she dislikes lying when it’s not.
She doesn’t seem to mind this kind of lie, though. Spending the majority of one’s time in a group of profilers, so close together they get claustrophobic from each others’ presence, they have all become accustomed to never having anything that’s private or sacred. But this thing they have is theirs, and only theirs, and they both discover that it’s really, unexpectedly fun to have this secret between them, kept from the rest of the team. Everything has hidden meanings and a lovely unseen tension to it, and it’s more than enough to sustain them through the long days of cases and paperwork until they find small stretches of time between working hours when they can be alone.
At the end of the day they leave at different times, and then, three, four, sometimes five nights a week, they’ll find their way to each other.
Once he comes home after a meeting with Hotch that went over-time and she is already inside, spread out on his bed in her underwear.
Several times, she comes home to find him fumbling take-out packages in her hallway, trying to fake nonchalance.
Most often, she knocks on his door in the dark and greets him with a kiss.
It’s an oddly quiet, sweet thing that shouldn’t work but does, and she tries not to analyse it any further than the fact that he makes her happier than she’s been in years.
...
3.
In their third month he takes her to a midnight Star Wars movie marathon because he has discovered, in attempting to carefully test the waters in regards to how far her nerdiness stretches, that she is an even bigger fan than he is. He is delighted by her geekish nature, over things he likes and things he doesn’t, because he’s never dated someone who actually wanted to spend an hour arguing over the structural integrity of the Millennium Falcon versus the Enterprise with him and who can spend ten minutes talking animatedly about French new wave cinema themes, only to blush and joke that she’s pulling a Reid when she realises that she’s been babbling on about something he couldn’t care less about.
They buy two huge buckets of popcorn, because as romantic as sharing is supposed to be, they are both serious about their junk food. Prentiss downs her coke in under ten minutes and is jiggling her leg from the need to pee less than halfway in to A New Hope. She doesn’t even consider leaving her seat till the movie is over, though, and he admires that. She is calmer when she comes back into the theatre during the first intermission, smiling shyly at him and stretching her legs out in front of her seat as the other patrons come and go in preparation for the next film. When Empire starts he reaches over and takes her hand, awkward and stiff till she grins at him in the dark and molds their palms together, shifting so they’re sharing the arm rest. They separate in the next intermission, stretching and visiting the bathrooms again, and when the final film starts she forgoes hand-holding, pushing the arm rest up and leaning against his side instead. He spares a moment to consider the fact that there were probably couples doing this, during this movie, possibly in this exact theatre, while he was still in diapers.
It’s a nice thought. It makes him feel so normal, somehow, like he fits in to the world for once.
Emily clutches his arm tighter during the good parts and laughs in the funny parts and swoons whenever Han is being rough and heroic and laughs when the scene with Leia’s famous gold bikini comes on and Reid gazes at the screen, lusting and adoring.
By the time they leave the cinema it’s after six am, and they’re both fuzzy and scratchy and sleep-deprived and running mainly on sugar. She slides her arm through his in the parking lot and tucks herself into his bony side as they walk to the car, fighting over which of the three is the superior movie.
Even with all the things he's been through, Reid somehow maintains a general geekish wonder about life. When he's focusing on something outside of himself, like her, or Star Wars, for instance, he is positive and sweet, and something she would call innocent if she didn't know so well that he was not. It's a lovely counterpoint to her cynicism that's starting to rub off on her, and she can't remember the last time she felt so content and relaxed about life in general.
They go back to her place and collapse in her huge, soft bed to sleep half the day away. She wakes up before him and stays still, comfortable where she is, lying on her side facing him and watching his face while he sleeps. She’s close enough that she can see all the little lines in the middle of his forehead and around the corner of his eyes, markers that come from nearly thirty years of frowning, concentrating, squinting at things; from journals to novels to human beings.
In sleep he looks older, which she is thankful for, because if he were to look any younger than he already does it might get a bit disconcerting to wake up next to him. Lying next to her, his face is wrinkled and stubbly, and his hair is all over the place. He smells warm and sleepy and wonderful.
She is well aware that these are not casual, low-pressure feelings, but chooses to shove those thoughts down somewhere where she can obsess over them later.
Instead she reaches a finger out and strokes it down the length of his nose, laughing as he snorts and wakes, blinking long, light eyelashes against his cheeks. He presses his lips together and they spring apart flushed pink, pulls the corner of his mouth up to smile at her. She takes a moment to soak in how sexy he is, all ruffled from sleep, then slides her bare leg slowly across his. She starts kissing her way down his cheek and neck and he stirs, bringing his hands up to bury them in her hair, pulling her mouth up to his to kiss her back with a sleepy, rough enthusiasm that turns her on so much coming from him.
He runs his fingers slowly up her sides and she shivers, trails them along the sides of her breasts and she feels fifteen again, breathless and wanting, when feeling a boy’s hand under her shirt was thrilling and new. He rolls himself on top of her and presses her down into the mattress, sharp hipbones digging in to the soft skin of her thighs, and it should hurt, but it’s become so familiar and so him she doesn’t even mind. His kisses are hard and intense and immediate, and he barely ever closes his eyes, watching her cheek and eyelashes dance out of focus as she kisses him back.
…
4.
Four months in they catch a really bad case, even by their standards, and Prentiss sags under the weight of it. There’s a group of highly organised male unsubs in Houston, kidnapping girls and keeping them for months in their own private torture chamber, and then releasing the girls, alive, but so completely ruined by what they’ve been through that they can barely even give the police their own names, let alone help them find their abusers. By the time the BAU is called in there have been four victims, that the police know about; two have killed themselves long before the plane even touches down, one has been taken into full-time psychiatric care and won’t speak, and the other just sits and cries, quietly, while Emily tries to question her.
She spends hours with the girl, forgoing fieldwork, interviews, conferences with the rest of the team, just trying to get her to warm to her, to feel safer, to stop crying, if nothing else. By the time she is asked to leave the hospital she has nothing to show for her efforts but nail marks in the palm of her hand from where the girl had clutched her tight enough to break the skin.
When she gets back to the hotel she is composed and professional while she fills Hotch in. After they say goodnight, Emily goes straight to Reid’s room instead of her own, rousing him from sleep and crawling into his bed. She presses her face into his neck, where it smells most like him, warm and clean, like washing powder and coffee, the stale air of the jet and his skin. She breathes deeply and lays perfectly still.
They don’t usually see each other while they’re on cases, though they deliberately haven’t made a rule against it, because they both have less than stellar histories when it comes to obeying the rules. But they have agreed that they shouldn’t, because it’s unprofessional, because they might get caught, and because it feels like a betrayal to the rest of the team.
She knows she’s being unfair to him, treating him so inconsistently, demanding casual and care-free and separate from their jobs and then coming to him in the middle of the night when they’re on a case because she’s so sad and dark inside and her resolve is wearing so very thin. She feels selfish and guilty but he welcomes her with open arms and kisses the top of her head and she can’t bring herself to leave.
Reid is the perfect person to come to in times like this. He is all too familiar with darkness and despair, so he is a good companion when someone else is knee-deep in it. He knows how to be quiet - and even when he doesn’t, she finds his rambling, long, tangential speeches oddly soothing, and always has. They are both subdued in their sadness, not loud and angry, like Morgan, or violent and brooding, like Hotch, and he relaxes her even without knowing he’s doing it. His arms are long and warm and wrap around her waist and she turns her body so her face is mostly hidden between his head and the pillow and just breathes.
She’s too wrecked to cry, too shattered to talk, so she just lies there and lets him stroke his hand along her back until she passes out.
…
Part 2