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The car’s A/C produced a sound and approximately no cold air, which Emily noted and Aaron declined to acknowledge. It told her everything she needed to know about the next four hours.
They could have turned back, she thought. It would’ve been a thirty-minute detour back to the precinct and probably another thirty minutes for them to find a replacement, provided that the tiny Midwest town even had a replacement car to spare. But even as the A/C cycled through its one setting — warm, slightly pressurised, and smelling a year old — Aaron drove and she watched the town disappear in the wing mirror, and it felt too late for her to raise a protest. JJ, Reid, Derek, and Dave had already monopolised the entire town’s supply of police cars, and certainly weren’t going to give one up for Emily and Aaron to make an eight-hour return trip to a federal prison to interrogate an inmate of interest.
She thumbed the dog-eared map that the sheriff had left on the dashboard with his warning that you won’t have GPS or cell signal for sections of the drive, and thought about how they’d never formally divided the labour between them. He’d accepted the keys from the sheriff with only a quick thank you and climbed into the driver’s seat without another word, leaving Emily riding shotgun with the map, and it also occurred to her in the moment that he hadn’t explained why he’d picked her to make the drive with him.
Emily hadn't asked, either. She'd told herself it was practical: she was the logical choice, the others had specific threads to pull on back in town, it was simply a matter of availability and proximity and nothing more — and she'd almost believed it, right up until the moment he’d declared that Prentiss and I will drive up to question him and felt some small private relief she that she didn’t dare to examine more closely.
Things had been different since she'd come back from Paris. She'd known they would be; she wasn't naive and knew fully well she'd been gone long enough for people to grieve and move on and build new configurations of their lives. But knowing hadn't made it easier to walk back into the BAU and find him changed. He was still precise and steady and exactly himself on the surface, except that there was someone else now, and she'd had to recalibrate around that without anyone noticing her do it.
She'd managed. She was good at managing. Beth Clemmons, by all accounts, was warm and lovely and Jack adored her. Emily had filed that information somewhere sensible and gotten on with the work, telling herself that the distance she felt was readjustment; it was merely the ordinary difficulty of returning to a place she’d left under rather extreme conditions.
She'd almost believed that.
Four hours, she'd thought as she gathered her jacket that morning. Four hours was enough time for anything.
And then she'd actually got in the car and sat down next to him, and she'd felt the tension immediately. It was emanating from him in measured, disciplined waves, his jaw set and shoulders controlled, mind already three steps into the case and moving. She’d understood within approximately ninety seconds that the four hours she'd been picturing — easy, unguarded, just the two of them and the road — were not the four hours she was going to get. Not yet, anyway.
She looked at the map: the interstate north, then county roads, then a stretch with no markings at all.
She turned the map slightly. It didn't help.
She recalled the album somewhere around the tenth exit and turned it up with a satisfied grin. Aaron remained quiet for approximately forty-five seconds.
"What is this?" It wasn’t a question exactly, but more of an assessment.
"Liz Phair," she said. "Exile in Guyville. 1993."
He said nothing. This was not, she had learned over the years, the same as agreement.
"It’s a watershed album," she said, and heard herself shift into a register she recognised as the one she used when she actually cared about something. "A song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, except that she first recorded it in her bedroom for basically nothing and it completely dismantled the idea that–"
She stopped. Aaron's hands were on the wheel at exactly ten and two and his jaw was stiff with tolerance. She looked at the road ahead of them and felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment. "It’s good," she said, after a moment. "Just — trust me."
The tension that’d followed them out of the small town only thickened as he contemplated the strident guitar riffs of 6’1". "Not quite my cup of tea," he said when they reached the closing bars.
She reached over to turn Liz’s voice off, and the silence that followed was considerable. Outside, the highway continued. They passed a billboard for a personal injury lawyer, then a lone water tower, and then the view flattened into the long grammar of interstate driving. After a while, Aaron turned on the radio, found a news channel, and settled back into his seat without a single word.
"Really," she said. "You’re going with the boring choice."
He said nothing and adjusted the volume slightly upward. She looked out the passenger window as a correspondent was explaining something about the Senate in the disinterested tone of a cynic who had long ago made peace with the horrors of neoliberal capitalism.
It was, she thought, extremely on brand for Aaron.
"Is Jack excited for summer?"
They’d been driving in silence for what felt like an eternity, although the blinking dashboard clock said otherwise. Aaron’s hands hadn’t left the wheel once, and the monotony of the news on the radio made the atmosphere even drearier than she’d imagined. And so she’d racked her brain for something else to fill the space, since he’d quickly shut down her attempt to appreciate the sonic stylings of Liz Phair.
Jack. Jack was always a safe conversation topic. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of that from the get-go. It was neutral ground - easy to talk about and helpfully, something that wasn't the BAU’s case or the heat or the atmosphere that had been building in the car since Exit 14 of the highway.
"Very," Aaron replied, and his voice loosened slightly — it always did when Jack came up. "He's been asking about the Smithsonian Zoo for weeks. Apparently there's a new elephant."
Bingo. She’d finally eased some of the tension. "That's sweet," she said. "It'll be nice for him to spend some time with Beth."
Beth. She’d said it as easily and warmly as she always did, in her best attempt to pretend that it was just a name and not the shape of everything she’d been quietly managing for months.
There was a beat — a long one.
"Beth won't be taking him," he said, carefully, and the air in the car changed instantly."Beth and I — we're not together anymore."
Emily turned to look at him then, just briefly, because she couldn’t help the instinct to read his face before she’d decided what to do with her own. He was looking at the road, his expression careful and still and giving nothing more away — infuriatingly still, in fact. She’d spent years learning to read the small degrees of him, and still he gave her nothing she could use at this moment.
She wondered, not for the first time, what it would cost him to just let something show.
"Oh," she said eventually. She heard a slight unevenness in her own voice she hadn't authorised, and looked back at the map with great focus while she sorted herself out. It had nothing useful to offer either.
She was silent for a moment, because there was an order of operations happening inside her chest that required her full attention. The shock arrived first, clean and sharp, before she could prepare for it — the simple fact of not knowing. She'd been picturing his weekends and evenings a certain way, which she'd had no right to picture at all and had been picturing anyway.
The relief came second, which she immediately felt terrible about.
Then the happiness, sudden and embarrassing in its specificity, got buried before it reached her face.
She looked at the map in her lap. She looked at the road. She watched a hawk turn lazy circles above a field to their right and thought about nothing in particular for long enough that the silence became its own kind of statement.
And then the hurt arrived, quieter than the rest and settling behind her sternum.
She couldn't be hurt about the breakup; she had no standing to be hurt about the breakup, and she knew it. But she also knew that she was hurt by the silence around it. She’d thought — she'd always thought — that she was someone he could tell things to, even with the time she’d been away and all the changes that’d taken place in her absence. The two fleeting seconds of relief and joy she’d allowed herself were promptly expunged from her system.
"When did—" Her mouth felt like lead as she started, and stopped, and started again. "How long ago?"
"Almost two months now," he said quietly, his eyes fixed on the road ahead of them.
Two months. Long enough that she should have known, and long enough that she'd been wrong about things for longer than she'd realised. The hurt in her voice that slipped past her facade of calmness surprised both of them. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I know," he said, with an exhale that was almost a sigh. "I should have."
It was true, but not the whole truth, and they both knew it.
"What happened?"
"We called it off. Beth said that I was… somewhere else."
He didn't say where. She didn't ask.
She almost asked. The word was right there, forming itself — where — and then she looked at his hands on the wheel, and the careful set of his jaw, and she let it go. Some things she didn’t dare to ask in a car with at least two hours still to go.
"I’m sorry, Aaron."
It was kind and true but also not nearly everything she was thinking, and he received it quietly, the way he received most things from her.
A truck passed going the other way and made the car rock slightly in its wake. And then they were back in the heat and the silence, and she reached for the radio knob to turn the news channel up.
Two months. It had been two months and he hadn't told her, and she had been — what, exactly? Waiting without knowing she was waiting. The hurt was embarrassing in its specificity and she shrank into her seat. She had been managing herself around something that no longer existed, all that careful distance, all that — discipline, and for what?
She wanted to say I would have wanted to know. She wanted to say you could have told me. She wanted to say something that would make him understand that she had never really been asking about Beth.The words sat in her mouth and she didn't say them.
Beth said that I was… somewhere else.
It would have been slightly easier if he'd said it badly, or if he’d been clumsy or unaware or obtuse about it, but he wasn't. He said exactly enough and left her with all the space in the world to say something; now she was sitting in that space silently and hated herself very slightly for it.
She looked out the passenger window. The blankness of the highway landscape gave her nothing to focus on and therefore nothing to hide behind. And here she was, in a too-hot car going seventy on a highway sitting next to Aaron Hotchner, with absolutely nowhere to go.
The prison visit had been, if nothing else, useful. Not just for the case — though it had been that too, the inmate giving them enough to bring back to the team to finish the profile — but because it had required their full attention for two hours. Emily had been grateful for it in a way she hadn’t anticipated; it provided the small mercy of having somewhere else to put herself.
Now she was back in the car with Aaron.
It was hotter than when they’d left it, the interior having spent two hours collecting afternoon sun with nothing to do but intensify, and she felt it settle over her like a second skin as she pulled the door shut. He had already adjusted the vents, and still the A/C had not improved in their absence.
They drove in a silence that was different from that morning’s silence. It was easier, she thought, or maybe just emptier, the interview having taken something out of both of them. They traded notes and theories in the shorthand they’d developed over years, half sentences and gestures punctuated by the occasional question. She made an observation about the timeline of the murders and he agreed; he said something about the accomplice angle and she texted it to Derek and Dave dutifully.
The highway unspooled ahead of them, flat and bright and endless in the mid-afternoon glare. After a while Aaron said, with his eyes still on the road, "I could use a bathroom stop."
"The sign said that there’s a rest stop in two miles," he added, and she nodded.
The rest stop looked like it had been given up on a decade ago. A sign with a missing letter that nobody had gotten around to fixing hung above the door, and from the passenger seat she could see a row of vending machines visible through the dusty glass doors, standing in their own fluorescent light like sentinels of poor nutrition. The parking lot was vast and sun-bleached and nearly empty in the midday heat.
He said back in a minute and she watched him stride away purposefully, even for something as rudimentary as a bathroom break, and then she was alone with the car and the heat and the last six hours still sitting in her chest. She needed air, which was funny because the outside was not really air so much as heat with ambitions, thick and still and suffocating. But it was better than the confines of the car with its broken A/C, and so she got out and stretched as the sun hung over her.
The car door clicked shut behind her with a thud.
She looked at it.
She looked at the keys, which were in the cupholder. Which were inside the car. Which was now locked.
She grabbed the door handle and tugged on it for at least a full minute, only to find the car completely unmoved by her feelings about the situation. For a moment after she stood there in the full blaze of the sun, hands on her hips, looking at her own reflection in the car window. Behind her reflection, the keys sat in the cupholder, mocking her.
She could tell Aaron when he got back, or she could stand here long enough that the problem solved itself. Neither seemed likely to go well.
The glass doors opened and he walked out, jacket over one arm, squinting slightly into the sun. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at the locked car.
"Emily."
"I know."
"Are the keys—"
"Yes."
"Did you try—"
"Yes."
They were silent for a beat. She tried and failed to avert eye contact as he made his own futile attempts to wrestle with the car door.
He didn't shout or sigh when he came to the realisation that he wasn’t getting the door open without damaging one of the small town’s only cars. His jaw clenched for just a second, and that was all. She had seen Aaron Hotchner face down unsubs in enclosed spaces, deliver death notifications to devastated families, and sit across from killers and give nothing away, so she knew what his controlled face looked like. This was his controlled face.
It was, objectively, a very good controlled face.
It did not make her feel better.
"Okay," he said eventually, which was somehow worse than anything else he could have said. He turned toward the building, and she followed, and the doors opened and the fluorescent light swallowed them both.
He strode toward the back of the building with his jacket over one arm, and she thought about the locked car sitting in the sun outside and felt the crawling awfulness of having caused a problem she couldn’t fix. She was a federal agent. She’d talked down unsubs in active situations, navigated foreign intelligence services in multiple languages, and bluffed her way through hostage situations with broken ribs and bruises. And today, she had locked them out of a rental car in a rest stop in the middle of nowhere because she’d wanted some air.
It almost made her forget, briefly, the conversation they hadn’t finished — the one that had been sitting in the car with them since the morning, taking up all the space. Somewhere else and its implications and the words they both hadn’t said were unresolved and waiting.
She almost forgot. But she thought about it now, standing under the fluorescent lights while Aaron dialled the number of the mechanic whose faded poster was on the wall, and felt worse. She stood slightly to his left and listened to him be exceptionally polite to someone who was clearly being unhelpful, his voice even and sentences precise. Not a single visible sign of frustration appeared on his face, except for the very slight way he closed his eyes for half a second when the mechanic put him on hold.
She had done that. She had caused that closed-eye second.
"An hour," he said. "He’s finishing up another job."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I know," he said. And then he looked at her, and the frown was already gone, smoothed back into his usual unreadable expression, and he tilted his head slightly toward the counter. "Come on. Might as well grab a bite."
The woman sitting behind the counter was engrossed in a soap opera playing on her small TV set. She gestured at the display case without looking up, where pre-wrapped sandwiches in triangular plastic sat haphazardly on a plastic tray.
Emily studied the sandwich options with the seriousness they did not deserve. "Tuna or egg mayo," she said.
He looked at them for a moment. "Neither."
"That's not one of the options."
"Egg mayo, then."
She grabbed two sandwiches and coffee cups and slapped a bill on the counter before he could get his wallet out, with a look that said I locked us out of the car and stranded us in the middle of nowhere, so I should at least pay for lunch. He had the wisdom not to protest.
The coffee came out of a machine that probably hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. What emerged was hot and brown and technically coffee in the way that their sad-looking sandwiches were technically food. She also picked up a packet of chips from the rack by the register, radioactive orange and aggressively flavoured, and added it to the pile without comment.
He looked at it.
"Don't," she started.
He didn't.
They took a table by the window. Outside, the car sat in the sun, locked and indifferent. The keys were visible, just barely, in the cupholder, and she chose not to look at them.
The sandwiches were exactly what they promised to be, which was not a compliment. He ate his without complaint and Emily found herself watching him do it: eating a terrible sandwich in a rest stop off a federal highway, jacket folded over the back of a plastic chair, tie loosened exactly one increment from this morning. And the coffee was bad enough that they both made the same face at the first sip, a brief involuntary moment of solidarity, and she laughed before she could help it. When he looked at her, the tension between them shifted a degree or two toward warmth.
She set her cup down and looked at it with genuine accusation. "That," she declared with gusto, "is not coffee."
"No," he agreed.
"That is the memory of coffee. Coffee's estranged cousin."
He looked at his own cup. "Hey, we’re in the middle of nowhere. It's not that bad."
She stared at him in disbelief.
"Okay, it’s bad," he conceded.
She laughed first. He didn't laugh exactly, but the corner of his mouth curved upwards just enough for her to know that more of the car tension quietly left the building. "For what it's worth," he said, looking at his cup, "the police station in that town has worse coffee."
"Then that’s one small perk of being stuck here for the next hour."
He cracked a tiny smile as he took another bite of his stale sandwich. "I guess it is."
It was the coffee that did it, really — the shared indignity of it. They’d been careful with each other all day, all week, and possibly for years, and now were coming undone by mediocre rest stop coffee.
"This is a terrible rest stop," she offered.
"Yes."
"The sandwiches are genuinely upsetting."
"Indeed."
Something loosened, finally, in the set of his shoulders. He refilled her coffee cup without asking, and she thought about the Beth conversation and somewhere else - and the fact that they had forty minutes and a locked car and nowhere to go. The terrible food helped, somehow. There was something levelling about being two federal agents, both of them considerably overqualified for this particular plastic table, eating sandwiches that had clearly given up on themselves. She opened the bag of chips she’d picked up at the counter and held them out to him.
He glanced at them. "I’m fine."
"They’re good."
"They’re neon orange."
"That’s not a flavour complaint, that’s an aesthetic complaint, and we’re in a rest stop in the middle of nowhere so I’m going to need you to recalibrate your standards." She shook the bag slightly. "Take a chip, Aaron."
He took one.
She watched him chew on it skeptically, and then watched him reach for another, and said nothing. She missed this, she realised; she missed the specific comfort of his company and how she felt like herself in a way she didn’t always manage elsewhere, even if the distance between them had grown over the past year due to circumstances partly out of both their control.
He looked down at his coffee cup, turning it slightly in his hands, and when he next spoke, his voice was quieter than usual. "I should have told you, Emily," he said. "About Beth. I know that."
She went very still. His voluntary offering of it without being asked was so far outside his usual territory that for a moment she didn’t quite know what to do with it. He wasn’t a man who circled back or reopened things, and yet here he was, in the fluorescent light of the worst rest stop in the Midwest, reopening it.
He was still looking at his cup when she spoke. "You should have," she said, not quite looking at him either. "I would have wanted to know."
"It wasn’t—" he started, and stopped. Outside, a truck pulled in, its hydraulic brakes sighing. "It wasn’t working. For a while, actually. I think we both knew."
Emily waited. She had learned, over years, the discipline of not filling the silence he needed to find his way through something. It cost her more today than usual.
"She said I was somewhere else," he said, echoing the words he’d used earlier. "That my heart wasn’t in it."
Somewhere else. She’d been thinking about those words for hours, and still they hung in the air between them. She knew what she wanted them to mean. In fact, she had known, probably, before he’d finished the sentence. The hope arrived so quickly and so specifically that it frightened her a little, because she’d spent a long time being very careful not to hope about Aaron Hotchner.
It could mean anything. It probably means something specific. She was a profiler and she thought she knew what it meant, but she was also a person who had been wrong about things before — and she also knew the particular humiliation of having built something real in her head out of materials that turned out to be wishful thinking.
He didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t ask him to. The word where formed itself in her mind yet again and she set it aside, carefully. "That must have been hard to hear," she said instead, which was true and careful, and yet not nearly the half of it.
"I don’t know that it was," he said, after a moment, and she felt the weight of that admission land in her chest.
She reached for the chip bag and held it out to him without saying anything, because her hands needed something to do and she didn’t trust her voice to stay level if she tried to speak. He took one and looked at her, unguarded and carrying a feeling she could never quite bring herself to name. It lasted only a second, or maybe even less, but it hit her nonetheless.
She thought about how she had absolutely no way of knowing whether she was reading this correctly, constructing an elaborate fiction out of a man’s expression and a six-word sentence in a Midwest rest stop.
She thought about how it would feel to be wrong about this.
She also thought about how it would feel to be right.
She desperately wanted to ask where he’d gone to. She wanted to say elsewhere where, Aaron, be specific, I need you to be specific just this once — but she looked at him and understood he already was giving her everything he currently knew how to give in the moment. And so she picked up the terrible coffee instead and thought — not for the first time, and not for the last — that she was so tired of being careful.
"You could have just— called," she said, almost lightly. "Or told me on the jet. I was right there."
"I know."
"I’m still right here."
His eyes landed on hers again, and this time, it wasn’t the sideways glance from earlier. It was direct, deliberate, and held a fraction longer than it needed to be. "I know," he said again. "I wanted to tell you. I picked up the phone a few times and almost brought it up on the jet. But I didn’t know how to start it."
She held very still. For Aaron Hotchner, who did not explain himself and never volunteered the interior workings of anything if he could possibly avoid it, it was an enormous confession.
"I’m sorry. You should have heard it from me earlier."
She looked at the effort it had taken him to say that, visible in the slight tension around his eyes. "Okay," she said quietly.
It wasn’t forgiveness exactly, but felt enough for the moment. He knew the difference and so did she, and that was its own kind of closeness.
She reached for another chip. He reached for one too, at the same moment, and their fingers brushed in the bag. Neither of them moved immediately.
Outside, the mechanic’s truck finally pulled into the car park. She felt, underneath everything, the small and stubborn persistence of hope.
The mechanic was seventeen, or looked it, and strolled across the parking lot like time was an abstract concept to him. He approached with a slim jim and an expression of boredom.
He had the door open in forty-five seconds. Emily watched this happen and felt the humiliation of it.
"That’s all?"
"Yup," said the mechanic.
Aaron tipped him, because of course he did. Aaron tipped him the exact correct amount without hesitation, his absolute competence in every small thing such a specific and maddening quality. They stood by the car for a moment before getting in. The door was unlocked, the crisis resolved, and they had no reason to linger, but they lingered anyway.
The inside of the car was an oven, and the A/C made its usual sound of futile effort. "Still broken," she observed.
"Still broken," he confirmed. He adjusted the vents again, the same pointless gesture from this morning, and she looked at his hands doing it and said nothing as she put her seatbelt on.
She was aware, getting back into the car, of how different the afternoon felt from the morning. The careful distance she had been maintaining all day — that precise, habitual management of herself around him — had loosened over a terrible sandwich and worse coffee, and she wasn't sure she had the energy or desire to pull it back into place, and so she didn’t.
He didn't either. "Ready?" he asked.
She looked at the road ahead and the afternoon that was still waiting for them. "Yes," she replied.
She was reaching for the radio to turn the news channel back on when he said, with his eyes on the road, "You can put your album back on."
She looked at him quizzically.
"Liz Phair," he said, as if clarifying.
"I know what album," she said. "Didn’t you hate it?"
"I didn’t hate it."
"Aaron." She turned in her seat slightly. "You made a face."
"I was adjusting to it."
She took that as a concession, put the album on from the beginning, and turned it up just enough. The car was still scorching hot, the A/C showing no signs of improving, but it was a less oppressive heat now although the sun still hung high in the sky. She was aware of him beside her in a way that had shifted register entirely from this morning, when the tension had been all edges and careful distance. This was warmth.
She had spent so long being careful around him and holding the feeling at an arm’s length, giving it no oxygen, that she had almost convinced herself it was manageable. For so long, she’d almost believed her own performance of collegial warmth and nothing more. And then he had said my heart wasn’t in it in a rest stop over stale coffee, and she had finally put down the performance and sat down beside it.
Neither of them mentioned the sandwiches and coffee or the hour in the fluorescent light of the worst rest stop in the Midwest where everything had shifted between them without either of them naming it. He drove with one hand on the wheel now, his shoulders looser and easier than she’d seen him all day. When she glanced at him now, he didn’t have the look of a man bracing for something. He looked like he had put something down too.
A mile passed, then two.
"I found this album in grad school," she said to the windscreen. "Someone left a cassette in the common room and I listened to it on a Tuesday afternoon when I was supposed to be writing a paper and I was basically useless for two days afterwards."
He said nothing, which was his version of keep going.
"It said things I hadn’t heard said before." She looked at the road. "I’ve moved a lot. A lot of cities, a lot of apartments. This album has been in every single one of them."
"That makes sense," he said quietly. "I’m glad you put it on," he added, quieter still. "It’s very you."
He reached over and turned the volume up, just slightly, and she looked at his hand on the dial and didn’t examine what she felt at seventy miles an hour.
The light fell across the dashboard as they turned back onto the highway. She caught him looking at her at the junction — and then his eyes were back on the road before she could fully register it. She looked out the window and smiled at the glass where he couldn’t see it.
An hour later, she caught him looking again. This time, she turned before he looked away and their eyes met and held; he was close enough that she was aware of the exact distance between them in a way she hadn't let herself be all day. Then she looked back at the road and made a deliberate decision not to think about what it meant or what she was going to do about any of it. The afternoon was warm and the music good and he was right there, and that was already more than she’d had this morning.
Eventually, the small town appeared on the horizon, the water tower first, then the cluster of rooftops, then the turn-off they’d taken that morning in what felt like a different version of the day entirely. He slowed as they came off the main road, and she reached forward and turned the volume down but didn’t turn it off, and the last track played quietly under the sound of the indicator and the gravel of the car park.
He pulled into a space and neither of them moved immediately. Outside, through the window of the building where they’d left the team that morning, she could see the shapes of people moving. The case was waiting, and reality would soon reassemble itself around them.
"We should— " she started.
"Dinner?" he asked. "When we get home. If you— we could catch up properly."
She registered the careful, certain way he’d said it, like he’d been deciding it for hundreds of miles and had simply waited for the right moment to say it out loud.
"Catch up," she said.
"And talk about this. If you want."
She held his gaze for a moment. "Sure," she said. "Dinner."
She was smiling before she'd finished saying it and tried to look away before he could clock it, which probably didn't work, because he was Aaron and he clocked everything.
She got out of the car and he followed. "I won't lock us out of the car when we're at dinner," she said, over her shoulder.
"I'll pick you up."
She turned to look at him. He was already walking toward the building, but she caught, at the edge of his profile, the unmistakable curve of a smile he was making absolutely no effort to suppress. For a second, she stood still in the car park with the afternoon air warm on her face before she laughed, once. Then she followed him back inside, and didn't bother hiding that she was smiling too.
Inside, Dave looked up from his notes, looked at her, and then looked at Aaron coming in next to her. He glanced back down at his coffee with a smug expression.
She took her seat and opened her file without acknowledging Dave. When we get home — not tonight or tomorrow, but home, days away still, the case and the ordinary machinery of the BAU to get through first. And he’d said it anyway – he’d made the decision somewhere on the interstate and saw no reason to keep it to himself.
Derek said something about the timeline and she answered him and the day resumed around them both, albeit entirely different from this morning. She looked up between pages and found Aaron already looking at her from across the room, and he smiled — small, certain, and entirely for her — and looked back down at her case file.
Three days, maybe four.
It was not very long at all, she thought, and as she turned the page, she found that she was smiling again.