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I waited so long for love
and suddenly, here it is
standing in the garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun.
Joy Sullivan
There are many things to notice about Emily Prentiss.
Her watch face hidden on the inside of her wrist. The languid perch of her body on desks, indiscriminate, her feet barely skimming the floor. She suspends herself like this often, lounging as if making up for years spent contorting herself into unnatural positions.
There’s the white eyeliner, too, a rarity, but when she does wear it, he can’t prevent his double take, totally captivated by the sight. And some days, a strain of an old hymn hummed under her breath as she passes him by—“What Wondrous Love Is This” more often than not, seemingly her favorite for when she’s deep in thought, teetering on the edge of insight.
Today, it’s tomatoes.
They’re in Fresno and lunch is a platter of deli sandwiches, a precinct staple, and he watches as she flips the top slice of bread over to remove the offending ingredient from its throne of roasted turkey.
“Not a tomato person?”
She smiles, caught, even before her eyes flash up to meet his. “Actually, I quite like them. Just not like this.”
He sinks into the seat across from her. Takes the bait. “How do you prefer them?”
The question couldn’t be more innocuous, yet shortly after the words leave his lips, it occurs to him that her mouth is as red as the fruit, and the moment suddenly feels strangely intimate. What taste do you like spilling down your throat, he might as well have asked.
As it turns out, her answer is a little bit ruined, grill marks branded into their flesh.
Actually, her exact words are “Have you ever had them grilled?” and no, he hasn’t. Her voice is low and sweet, like she’s about to divulge a secret that will change his life, and he leans in automatically as she recounts the Ambassador’s posting to Morocco. She paints the scene with ease, like an Impressionist of old. The smells of the medina: za’atar and fresh bread, clay ovens and tobacco. The bright indigos and oranges of the tanneries. The chef who practiced Arabic with her in the garden. Figs, teen. Apricots, mishmish. Carrots, jazar.
“I always told myself that if I ever put down roots somewhere, I’d get a tomato plant of my own,” she says, and he doesn’t miss the melancholy of that if. “All because of that garden. There was just something so idyllic about it at that age, still young enough for things to seem both simple and larger than life.”
“How old were you?” He imagines her when he first met her, a few months shy of twenty. Even though their paths had hardly crossed, he’d known at first blush that there was nothing else shy about her: not the sighs he’d hear from her bedroom, music futile in its efforts to mask the contented sounds, not the smiles she’d shoot him in passing, unmistakably feline.
“Twelve. God, do you remember being that young?”
His father’s thunder. His brother’s cheeks streaked with tears. Self-soothing in the backyard, hands fisting in the perfect grass until chlorophyll dyed his palms.
“Barely,” he says.
“What are you reading?”
Another case closed, this time in Alpine. She’s on her phone in the passenger seat as he drives back to the hotel, and the only sound is the gentle tap of her thumb as she scrolls.
He likes having her there. She’s quiet, never really feels the need to fill the silence just for the sake of it, but when she does speak, it’s with abandon. Rather, with abandon with him. In noticing so much about her, he’s also noticed that she lets him in more than she does the others. He doesn’t know what to do with this privilege other than treasure it, hoard it, coax it forth every so often. Like now.
She laughs a little, then sets her phone down and closes her eyes. “Grill pans,” she murmurs, stretching. “I’m reading online reviews of various grill pans. Our conversation the other day made me think about reinvesting in my kitchen. But I don’t know, maybe it’s silly to buy a whole new appliance just because I want to grill some tomatoes.”
With hardly any other cars on the dusty desert road, he chances a glance at her. The deep purples and blues of the wide West Texas sky reflect onto her skin like a bruise. He wants to soothe with his thumb.
Instead, he says, “Not silly," a low rumble. “If you want it and you’ll use it,” if it’ll make you feel at home, “then it’s worth it. But,” he adds, and his eyes are back on the road now, because if he looks at her, he knows he’ll lose his nerve, “for the record, I have an outdoor grill.”
Her eyes flutter open slowly, and there it is—that feline smile. Twenty years on and it still makes him feel precisely the same. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. You should come over some time.”
She hums, pleased. “I’d like that.”
She never makes it.
A slender gift box makes its way to her first, a freesia stem entombed inside.
Pakistan is sweltering, the heat almost as oppressive as his guilt.
Despite the temperature, he wakes in a cold sweat most nights. The visions that play behind his eyes are startlingly real: Emily, her fingers stained red. Emily, dancing in a garden gone fetid. Emily, dead in bed beside him.
The latter has him stumbling out of his barracks, bile rising in his throat. He drops weight quickly, and not even the switch from MREs to flatbreads and hearty stews helps.
(He is plied with tomato chutney precisely once, enough spice in it to bring someone back to life. She’s already all he can think about, but the way his tongue goes numb makes him think of her, too.)
The thing is, she has always noticed him noticing her. It’s part of the reason she takes her glass of wine and slips out of their carbonara lesson, wandering out onto the lawn to tilt her face up to the stars.
Even as a child, she wondered—regularly, morbidly—if anyone would register her absence. She never really tested this curiosity; she knew what her mother’s answer would be. But with him, she has set herself up to win.
Sure enough, her absence lures him out.
“You okay?”
She studies him, her turn to observe. There are many things to notice about Aaron Hotchner: how he balls his fist at heart level to calm himself, like his resolve is a tangible thing, or his single white eyelash, inexplicably precious. And then there’s the way he’s looking at her now, like he sees right to the core of her. Like he knows she has thought of leaving, a brief spark of that same childhood curiosity. Would anyone care?
She knows suddenly that he would, and it renders her breathless.
“I’m great,” she says, a hand on his elbow.
At Ziggy’s, they toast to her and her winning bid on the house.
Contrary to their consensus on the jet, they haven’t cleared out the champagne inventory, but they have made a sizable dent, and as a result, they’ve all had their turn on the dance floor with her.
Well. All of them but him, but that’s okay.
Really, it is. He hasn’t been anyone’s first choice in years, and it is enough to him to hear her bubbly laugh as Rossi spins her into a dip that absolutely, categorically, does not fit the song that’s playing.
Only—then she rises out of it and their gazes lock and it’s suddenly so obvious that she has saved him for last deliberately. She comes toward him, and even as the music slows to a well-loved jazz standard, she’s a blur of red, mischief made incarnate.
“Dance with me,” she says, extending her hand.
He takes it.
“Congratulations,” he says again, intended only for her this time. They’ve never touched like this, but she fits against him like a Klimt painting, and just as surreal.
“Thank you.” She slides her hand from atop his shoulder to his bicep. “Can I tell you a secret? I’m fucking terrified,” she says on a laugh, holding onto him a little tighter.
Can I tell you a secret, she says, and he wants to answer with always. How many secrets have they kept for each other over the years? How many secrets of hers will he hold before she realizes she doesn’t even have to ask?
“There are cracks in the foundation,” she reveals.
She’s barely audible over the sizzle of the grill. Chef would pick the biggest plum tomatoes from the garden and char them, then split them over a bed of rice and meat, or over yogurt and olive oil for dipping, she’d recalled, a faraway look in her eyes. Now, he watches as she does the same.
“What did Morgan say?”
A non-committal twitch of her shoulder. “That cracks can be fixed. But…”
Her voice trails away, a curl of smoke.
He knows what she’s stopping herself from saying, of course. Knows intimately what it is like for metaphor to be the only acknowledgment that feels safe. What it’s like to wonder if you’ll ever really be able to return—to the team, to the job, to yourself—after cracks like the ones on his chest. Because what if the crack isn’t an anomaly? What if disaster is built into every brick, the whole structure wilted and weak? What if the effort isn’t worth it?
(What if it is?)
“Can you think of the crack as something that deserves tending to instead? Something that, with reinforcement, can be even stronger than before?”
Their eyes meet.
For a moment—hope.
He’s early to her housewarming, but she doesn’t mind. It feels very, very right for him to be the first one to cross the threshold, especially this version of him, light stubble and soft denim. There’s a curious look on his face, though, the tender side of nervous, and it’s then that she realizes he has something hidden behind his back.
“Hold out your hands,” he says with a smile, preempting the question he could already see in the slight tilt of her head. In her upturned palms, he places a small plastic pot—a seedling, beautifully alive.
“What is it?” she breathes, but her eyes are wide and her heart is wild and she thinks she already knows.
Slowly, he rotates the plant so she can see the marker nestled in the lush soil.
Tomato, it reads. Solanum lycopersicum.
“Roots,” he says, then kisses her.