Chapter Text
Sometimes he’s unsure of how it came to pass. But then he takes a moment, thinks about the history of it in its totality and it seems as if it was always meant to turn out this way. And that thought usually renders him silent and amazed for a considerable amount of time.
He and Emily begin as a drunken slip-up. These things happen, he tells himself even as he feels that he’s violated some secret oath taken not to screw up ever. They’re human, and it turns out wonderfully so when together and down a bottle of scotch. That first night he does things to her that he hasn’t done since college, but with the careful silence and focus that he’s honed in the twenty-five years since. When she twists under him in the dark, tasting of sweat and scotch and being loud in direct proportion to his silence, he gets a sliver of that youthful invincibility back from a time before he locked down ‘Hotshot’ in Hotch’s custom made suits. At dawn when she slips from his bed, he thinks this can never happen again, as well as I have to have her again.
He never knows if she has any hesitation after that first night; she’s always so unerringly professional at work and he’s a bit of a coward about facing up to what has happened. But two weeks later when they step off the jet after a brutal case in New York and he watches her walk to her car and then turn to look at him as if his stare was a pressure she could feel, he shivers with that almost-forgotten thrill of danger again, like hard candy slowly melting on his tongue. Maybe it’s as obvious to her as the press of his suits, even if it comes as a shock to him. She juts her chin at him and smiles, slow and knowing, and says “C’mon” before getting into her car and driving carefully to her place making sure that he’s two car lengths behind her the whole way.
“This is a bad idea,” he licks into her mouth as they stumble through her condo and try to undress each other with urgent hands.
“Are you kidding?” she laughs when she falls back onto the bed and drags him down with her. “Other than you being the boss, and a single dad, and a control freak, and us both being profilers, this is a fucking great idea.”
And when he makes her come with his hands, his mouth, and finally when he pushes into her and she curls and bends around him gratefully like burnt paper, he has to be honest and admit that, yes, it’s a great fucking idea after all.