Fic: 'The devil you don't know'; Hotch/Prentiss; M/NC-17; Part 2/2
Title: The devil you don’t know (part 2 of 2)
Author: flameturnedblue
Rating: M/NC-17 for language and sexual situaitons. Smut, basically.
Description: Human beings are never perfect, but being human is not necessarily a flaw. This is not a love story.
Disclaimer: I don't own the pretty, I just borrow for fun.
Note: A very special thank you to woodchoc_magnum for her beta help and unflagging support :)
Part I
She slipped off the bed and walked right up to him. He glared down at her (she was much smaller standing in her bare feet. He glimpsed crimson nail polish on her toenails), she glared up at him. She was carefully reading his eyes, his body language. She would know what he was really thinking. His feelings would betray his body. This was precisely why he avoided making eye contact with her as much as possible.
Her arms suddenly came down to his hips, then, unexpectedly, her hands thrust into his pockets. Through the thin materials of his slacks and boxers, she grazed his balls with her fingertips. He groaned deeply at the contact, and she kept playing, stroking more firmly now, teasing until he was sure he was going to shoot a load in his pants.
She was taking the lead; backing him firmly into the nearest wall to better press into him, until there was barely a millimetre of space dividing them. She had conveniently forgotten about his bad back, shoving him aggressively. He couldn’t say he didn’t like it, even if he knew he’d be crippled in the morning. Her arms were around his neck; errant fingers drawing dizzying semicircles at his sensitive nape. Her lips were tasting his, and he eagerly kissed them, his tongue hesitantly meeting hers, asking permission for something more. She was doing it again; making him want her until he was the one who took over and lost control of himself. Then it would be his fault all over again.
His hands were cradling her arms, her small elbows nestled in the crevice of his palms, allowing his fingers to explore the flesh of her inner arms. Smooth; exquisitely sensitive. The last time, she’d been wearing a jacket that they had only managed to half pull down her shoulders. He really hadn’t had an opportunity to caress her bare skin.
‘Tell me you don’t want me,’ she ordered. Challenged.
‘I don’t want you,’ he croaked, his pitch going an octave higher when she squeezed his balls again.
‘Say it like you mean it.’
‘I…Jesus, Dave can probably hear us, Prentiss…’
‘That bothers you more than anything else, doesn’t it? You think I’m going to scream the place down.’
‘No…’
‘If I do, I might scare away the unsub if he’s lurking outside.’ She grinned, and he stared at her, puzzled.
Then he put his hand to his face to cover a laugh and sobered up again just as quickly. It was impossible to despise her.
Emily moved her hands to press against his chest through his sweater. ‘Strauss is the Director now. She has what she’s always wanted, we’re just small fry to her. And don’t tell me you’re naïve enough to believe that people like us don’t do things like this.’
Her hands went down into his pockets again, an approach that was proving fruitful, she guessed, as he leaned into her and sighed softly against that strawberry scented hair.
She moved one hand free from a pocket and yanked at his zipper, releasing his straining cock into her grasp.
'Emily,' he mouthed urgently against her lips. He jerked when she ran a finger the underside length of his shaft, taking her time. Her thumb circled the tip.
'Emily,' he repeated, pleading this time.
He sensed that there was an enormous sense of expectation on her part, now that they were sharing a room for the entire night. She was the only woman he had been with since Haley, and before Haley, there hadn’t been anyone, not sexually. A couple of girlfriends, but all completely innocent. Haley was his first and last until Emily, not that he was planning on sharing this information. She probably thought he was a man of the world, well-versed in these matters. He knew how to please a woman, but he was also smart enough to know that it wasn’t straightforwardly transferable knowledge. What kicked it for one person wasn’t necessarily the thing for another.
He loved Haley until the day she died; he loved her still, in a way. A guild-ridden, nostalgic sort of affection. She was prim and proper in all aspects of her life, including her bedroom habits. Nothing too risqué, and half the time, he was convinced she was just going through the motions to do what she saw as her wifely duty. That made him feel like a pig. He blamed himself for never being there enough, and kept adoring her just the same.
But that was him, Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner, always sizing up a situation and doing mental calculations about everything from an unsub’s next move to what to have for dinner a week from now. He could organize the minutiae of his job and domestic duties, but human relationships were more finicky - they never conformed to a set series of predictable rules that he could successfully follow.
Nobody had ever told him that it was possible to love more than one person at any given time. He spilled some of his thoughts out into the ether on lonely nights, wondering if it got through to Haley, wherever she was. If only she could give him a sign; tell him what he should do.
He stumbled towards the bed with Emily, and when they both landed on it, breathless, it emitted an almighty creak.
‘The floor,’ Emily muttered, gesturing to the heap of blankets and pillows he’d arranged on there. ‘You’re a genius - that bed squeaks like hell. It’s probably seen it’s share of fun,’ she added.
He couldn’t believe he was standing there, listening to her tell him where they going to screw. It was beyond surreal.
***
He didn’t love Emily. He thought about her all the time - almost obsessively - but it wasn’t love. She pissed him off, undercut him, and often didn’t abide by his rules. She snared him, fooled him, enticed him; confused him.
One time, she even put him off his lunch - a perfectly good turkey on rye.
He couldn’t figure her out, even when he broke the cardinal rule of never profiling another team member. He profiled her all the time. If she was an unsub she would have outsmarted him at ever turn.
She was the only other person who knew that Elle Greenaway made advances towards him (it seemed certain colleagues he became emotionally entangled with always wanted retributive sex), and he loathed himself for letting it get that far, putting a halt to anything further. It was his only act of near-infidelity as a married man. He told Prentiss about it when she tried something in his office, and wondered how the hell he had the willpower to stop her when she’d had her hands down his pants for a full five minutes (she always went straight for the point of greatest weakness). How could she be so stupid? How could he? He had to suffer with blue balls for most of the day. Morgan even commented that he was walking funny, and he had to go relieve himself in a little-used toilet block far off in the basement. That too was a first in his unblemished Bureau career.
‘I won’t take it personally, then,’ Emily said before she left his office.
***
‘Don’t bite, don’t bite!’ he whispered urgently to her, tilting her mouth back to his to muffle her sobs with a kiss. She was in a mood to leave marks, especially since she couldn’t make much noise without arousing the suspicions of the others in the neighboring rooms. While he could disguise marks on a shoulder, or even an arm, it would be harder if she went for his neck, or somewhere about the collar line.
He considered that she viewed verbal sparring and his resistance as foreplay, because she was wet when his palm cradled her, and they were barely started.
He fought back a strangled sigh of pure pleasure when she trailed her fingers up and down his chest, stopping to brush his nipples more firmly under his tee. He’d insisted on keeping it on, having readily
kicked off his jeans and socks. This wasn’t going to be a pity show where his scars would be on display. He wasn’t ashamed of them, but it didn’t mean he liked showing them off. His body was purely functional to him. He kept it fed, warm, and he was in good physical condition for his age; he didn’t believe in beauty contests. It would hurt him infinitely more if someone derided his honor, ability, or intellect, than mocked his physical appearance.
He pulled a blanket over them, creating a kind of cavern, for it was cold in spite of the heat they were generating. In the warm cocoon it was just the two of them, the sounds of their labored breaths and the soft scrape and slap of skin-on-skin filling any space.
She was kissing his jaw and out of nowhere, he felt a rush of affection. Maybe he could love her.
He wanted to taste her.
Haley had only allowed him to go there now and again, despite his insistence that he really did enjoy it. It fascinated him. Perhaps she never quite believed him. She didn’t often reciprocate the gesture, either.
He broke from Emily’s hold and moved down her body, stopping to kiss her velvety stomach and rasp the flesh with his beard, which made her squirm and choke back a breathy squeal. His determined hands wound her pyjama bottoms down over her hips. Emboldened by her encouragement as she stroked his face, he pressed his nose to her center, through her underwear, and inhaled another scent that was uniquely hers. He wanted to imprint it in his memory forever; it was sweet and earthy all at once, and made him feel giddy. She began to push against his face, insisting on more contact, and he ham-fistedly slid her panties down, leaving her to wriggle them off and push them away from her finally, using her deft toes. His mouth covered her clit, at last, his tongue brushing, encircling, teasing, as he sucked lightly, slowly, and she fisted his hair, her back arching upwards. He could feel her pulsating, her thighs trembling against his shoulders.
He hesitated and she urged him not to stop. Emily was greedy when she was horny.
Hotch almost lost it when she let go of his face to play with her own breasts while he worked hard down below. He resumed his attention, kissing the insides of her thighs, back to her clit again, until she was drenched in her own juices and he relished her taste, far more than his curious mind had anticipated he would. He propped himself up on one elbow, trying to ignore the agonizing twinge of his stiff cock brushing against her legs when he shifted. He flicked his thumb across her clit and she gasped, making him smile smugly to himself. He was in control again. One of his long, thick fingers slid easily inside her. He noted that her eyes were shut tightly, mouth opened in an ‘o’ of ecstasy. He pulled it out slowly and added another, curling them upwards just a bit. She bucked against his hand, seeking movement and friction to quell her frustration. He began to fuck her with his fingers, alternating fast and slow rhythms, marvelling at her response. She was so vulnerable, then. He wondered if he should tip her over the edge completely, or be greedy like she was and claim her first waves of pleasure for himself.
He decided to do the gentlemanly thing and let her have all the attention for a couple of minutes. Not that he wasn’t already having fun himself.
He moved faster, his palm pressing the root of her clit at the same time, and as she was coming, he prayed she wouldn’t make much noise. She was biting her lip, and it occurred to him to offer her the fingers of his free hand to focus on. She grinned at him in the dimness (he thought she did) and took one in her mouth, sucking hard.
Now would be a good time to mentally recite the Bureau’s requisition policy in mind-numbing detail.
He felt her teeth when she did come, in rolling waves that coursed through her body, gradually subsiding to give way to a scarlet flush that colored her skin, from her chest right up to her cheeks. It gave her a different kind of raw beauty.
‘Hotch,’ she panted his name, ready for her second round. He was happy to oblige, moving over her so that they were face-to-face again, whereupon she kissed his mouth and hummingly approved of the taste of herself mingled with his.
It was incredible how humbling bodily functions could be: sweat and tears, saliva, and other fluids; breath that was hard to control, reactions that were automatic. When you stripped anyone bare and shared all of this with them, it was solidarity, even without the sex.
He inched inside her, and this time he took a moment to just feel the snug sensation of her, tight about him. She whimpered.
‘Hey there Chief,’ she whispered to him, through half-lidded eyes, drunk with contentment.
‘Hi,’ he whispered back, unused to sharing the intimacies of conversation and physicality with another. He wasn’t much of a talker.
He kissed her hard to shut her up, and began to move inside her at the same time.
‘For someone who doesn’t get laid very often, you’re pretty good at this,’ she groaned against his stubbly cheek
‘How do you know?’ He could barely muster the breath to speak, but at least it would distract him. Lord knows he needed distracting: he was right on the verge of…
‘Know what?’ she asked impatiently.
‘If I get laid very often?’
He stopped momentarily to look at her.
‘I just know, Hotch. Work means a lot to you.’ She said it like it was a bad thing.
‘You trying to kill the passion, Prentiss?’ he asked wryly, resuming the fuck, his balls slapping pleasantly against her ass.
‘Hmmm, I like this kind of passion…’
After that they were both gasping and incoherent. She came quickly again, still sensitive after his earlier attention, and he followed soon after, hard and fast, pumping erratically until ever last drop of cum was released from his body. He managed to quieten a moan to something that sounded like a soft cough, and she bit his shoulder again - hard - but he didn’t give a damn.
He rested inside her, leaning forward on his forearms until he felt himself going soft, and slipped out.
A feeling of immense satisfaction and momentary peace washed over him. He didn’t resist her arms as they wrapped around him and cradled his head to her chest. La petite mort. A piece of him had died and gone to heaven. The most awful thing was knowing the satisfaction wouldn’t last. It would be replaced with guilt and self-admonishment.
***
The next morning, he didn’t resist her pawing at him for some sleepy sex around dawn, allowing her to take the lead and straddle him for a quick one with few preliminaries or pleasantries. Allowing himself to doze for half an hour after, he rose before her, showered, shaved, and changed. He inspected the marks she left - nothing that would show.
She was brushing out her tangled bed hair when he came out of the bathroom.
‘Morning,’ she yawned.
‘Morning. I’m going to head downstairs and see what’s happening,’ he told her, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Damn, he could compartmentalize better than she did.
‘Okay, I’ll follow soon. I just need to hop in the shower.’
He nodded, standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets.
‘Are you…alright?’ That was all he could think of to ask. It always sounded dumb, but he always said it anyway.
‘Don’t worry, Hotch, I don’t want forever or anything domestic. I’m not the Martha Stewart type.’
‘I didn’t think you were.’
He was as infuriated with her now as he had been the evening before, when she insisted that they share a room. Nothing had changed.
'Bitch', was his last thought right before he smoothed down his hair, clenched his jaw, and went down to meet the team for breakfast wearing his polished Hotchner mask.
‘I like this side of you,’ she said as he turned his back. ‘It’s a completely different beast.’
He closed the room door firmly behind him and walked quickly down the hall.
Author: flameturnedblue
Rating: M/NC-17 for language and sexual situaitons. Smut, basically.
Description: Human beings are never perfect, but being human is not necessarily a flaw. This is not a love story.
Disclaimer: I don't own the pretty, I just borrow for fun.
Note: A very special thank you to woodchoc_magnum for her beta help and unflagging support :)
Part I
She slipped off the bed and walked right up to him. He glared down at her (she was much smaller standing in her bare feet. He glimpsed crimson nail polish on her toenails), she glared up at him. She was carefully reading his eyes, his body language. She would know what he was really thinking. His feelings would betray his body. This was precisely why he avoided making eye contact with her as much as possible.
Her arms suddenly came down to his hips, then, unexpectedly, her hands thrust into his pockets. Through the thin materials of his slacks and boxers, she grazed his balls with her fingertips. He groaned deeply at the contact, and she kept playing, stroking more firmly now, teasing until he was sure he was going to shoot a load in his pants.
She was taking the lead; backing him firmly into the nearest wall to better press into him, until there was barely a millimetre of space dividing them. She had conveniently forgotten about his bad back, shoving him aggressively. He couldn’t say he didn’t like it, even if he knew he’d be crippled in the morning. Her arms were around his neck; errant fingers drawing dizzying semicircles at his sensitive nape. Her lips were tasting his, and he eagerly kissed them, his tongue hesitantly meeting hers, asking permission for something more. She was doing it again; making him want her until he was the one who took over and lost control of himself. Then it would be his fault all over again.
His hands were cradling her arms, her small elbows nestled in the crevice of his palms, allowing his fingers to explore the flesh of her inner arms. Smooth; exquisitely sensitive. The last time, she’d been wearing a jacket that they had only managed to half pull down her shoulders. He really hadn’t had an opportunity to caress her bare skin.
‘Tell me you don’t want me,’ she ordered. Challenged.
‘I don’t want you,’ he croaked, his pitch going an octave higher when she squeezed his balls again.
‘Say it like you mean it.’
‘I…Jesus, Dave can probably hear us, Prentiss…’
‘That bothers you more than anything else, doesn’t it? You think I’m going to scream the place down.’
‘No…’
‘If I do, I might scare away the unsub if he’s lurking outside.’ She grinned, and he stared at her, puzzled.
Then he put his hand to his face to cover a laugh and sobered up again just as quickly. It was impossible to despise her.
Emily moved her hands to press against his chest through his sweater. ‘Strauss is the Director now. She has what she’s always wanted, we’re just small fry to her. And don’t tell me you’re naïve enough to believe that people like us don’t do things like this.’
Her hands went down into his pockets again, an approach that was proving fruitful, she guessed, as he leaned into her and sighed softly against that strawberry scented hair.
She moved one hand free from a pocket and yanked at his zipper, releasing his straining cock into her grasp.
'Emily,' he mouthed urgently against her lips. He jerked when she ran a finger the underside length of his shaft, taking her time. Her thumb circled the tip.
'Emily,' he repeated, pleading this time.
He sensed that there was an enormous sense of expectation on her part, now that they were sharing a room for the entire night. She was the only woman he had been with since Haley, and before Haley, there hadn’t been anyone, not sexually. A couple of girlfriends, but all completely innocent. Haley was his first and last until Emily, not that he was planning on sharing this information. She probably thought he was a man of the world, well-versed in these matters. He knew how to please a woman, but he was also smart enough to know that it wasn’t straightforwardly transferable knowledge. What kicked it for one person wasn’t necessarily the thing for another.
He loved Haley until the day she died; he loved her still, in a way. A guild-ridden, nostalgic sort of affection. She was prim and proper in all aspects of her life, including her bedroom habits. Nothing too risqué, and half the time, he was convinced she was just going through the motions to do what she saw as her wifely duty. That made him feel like a pig. He blamed himself for never being there enough, and kept adoring her just the same.
But that was him, Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner, always sizing up a situation and doing mental calculations about everything from an unsub’s next move to what to have for dinner a week from now. He could organize the minutiae of his job and domestic duties, but human relationships were more finicky - they never conformed to a set series of predictable rules that he could successfully follow.
Nobody had ever told him that it was possible to love more than one person at any given time. He spilled some of his thoughts out into the ether on lonely nights, wondering if it got through to Haley, wherever she was. If only she could give him a sign; tell him what he should do.
He stumbled towards the bed with Emily, and when they both landed on it, breathless, it emitted an almighty creak.
‘The floor,’ Emily muttered, gesturing to the heap of blankets and pillows he’d arranged on there. ‘You’re a genius - that bed squeaks like hell. It’s probably seen it’s share of fun,’ she added.
He couldn’t believe he was standing there, listening to her tell him where they going to screw. It was beyond surreal.
***
He didn’t love Emily. He thought about her all the time - almost obsessively - but it wasn’t love. She pissed him off, undercut him, and often didn’t abide by his rules. She snared him, fooled him, enticed him; confused him.
One time, she even put him off his lunch - a perfectly good turkey on rye.
He couldn’t figure her out, even when he broke the cardinal rule of never profiling another team member. He profiled her all the time. If she was an unsub she would have outsmarted him at ever turn.
She was the only other person who knew that Elle Greenaway made advances towards him (it seemed certain colleagues he became emotionally entangled with always wanted retributive sex), and he loathed himself for letting it get that far, putting a halt to anything further. It was his only act of near-infidelity as a married man. He told Prentiss about it when she tried something in his office, and wondered how the hell he had the willpower to stop her when she’d had her hands down his pants for a full five minutes (she always went straight for the point of greatest weakness). How could she be so stupid? How could he? He had to suffer with blue balls for most of the day. Morgan even commented that he was walking funny, and he had to go relieve himself in a little-used toilet block far off in the basement. That too was a first in his unblemished Bureau career.
‘I won’t take it personally, then,’ Emily said before she left his office.
***
‘Don’t bite, don’t bite!’ he whispered urgently to her, tilting her mouth back to his to muffle her sobs with a kiss. She was in a mood to leave marks, especially since she couldn’t make much noise without arousing the suspicions of the others in the neighboring rooms. While he could disguise marks on a shoulder, or even an arm, it would be harder if she went for his neck, or somewhere about the collar line.
He considered that she viewed verbal sparring and his resistance as foreplay, because she was wet when his palm cradled her, and they were barely started.
He fought back a strangled sigh of pure pleasure when she trailed her fingers up and down his chest, stopping to brush his nipples more firmly under his tee. He’d insisted on keeping it on, having readily
kicked off his jeans and socks. This wasn’t going to be a pity show where his scars would be on display. He wasn’t ashamed of them, but it didn’t mean he liked showing them off. His body was purely functional to him. He kept it fed, warm, and he was in good physical condition for his age; he didn’t believe in beauty contests. It would hurt him infinitely more if someone derided his honor, ability, or intellect, than mocked his physical appearance.
He pulled a blanket over them, creating a kind of cavern, for it was cold in spite of the heat they were generating. In the warm cocoon it was just the two of them, the sounds of their labored breaths and the soft scrape and slap of skin-on-skin filling any space.
She was kissing his jaw and out of nowhere, he felt a rush of affection. Maybe he could love her.
He wanted to taste her.
Haley had only allowed him to go there now and again, despite his insistence that he really did enjoy it. It fascinated him. Perhaps she never quite believed him. She didn’t often reciprocate the gesture, either.
He broke from Emily’s hold and moved down her body, stopping to kiss her velvety stomach and rasp the flesh with his beard, which made her squirm and choke back a breathy squeal. His determined hands wound her pyjama bottoms down over her hips. Emboldened by her encouragement as she stroked his face, he pressed his nose to her center, through her underwear, and inhaled another scent that was uniquely hers. He wanted to imprint it in his memory forever; it was sweet and earthy all at once, and made him feel giddy. She began to push against his face, insisting on more contact, and he ham-fistedly slid her panties down, leaving her to wriggle them off and push them away from her finally, using her deft toes. His mouth covered her clit, at last, his tongue brushing, encircling, teasing, as he sucked lightly, slowly, and she fisted his hair, her back arching upwards. He could feel her pulsating, her thighs trembling against his shoulders.
He hesitated and she urged him not to stop. Emily was greedy when she was horny.
Hotch almost lost it when she let go of his face to play with her own breasts while he worked hard down below. He resumed his attention, kissing the insides of her thighs, back to her clit again, until she was drenched in her own juices and he relished her taste, far more than his curious mind had anticipated he would. He propped himself up on one elbow, trying to ignore the agonizing twinge of his stiff cock brushing against her legs when he shifted. He flicked his thumb across her clit and she gasped, making him smile smugly to himself. He was in control again. One of his long, thick fingers slid easily inside her. He noted that her eyes were shut tightly, mouth opened in an ‘o’ of ecstasy. He pulled it out slowly and added another, curling them upwards just a bit. She bucked against his hand, seeking movement and friction to quell her frustration. He began to fuck her with his fingers, alternating fast and slow rhythms, marvelling at her response. She was so vulnerable, then. He wondered if he should tip her over the edge completely, or be greedy like she was and claim her first waves of pleasure for himself.
He decided to do the gentlemanly thing and let her have all the attention for a couple of minutes. Not that he wasn’t already having fun himself.
He moved faster, his palm pressing the root of her clit at the same time, and as she was coming, he prayed she wouldn’t make much noise. She was biting her lip, and it occurred to him to offer her the fingers of his free hand to focus on. She grinned at him in the dimness (he thought she did) and took one in her mouth, sucking hard.
Now would be a good time to mentally recite the Bureau’s requisition policy in mind-numbing detail.
He felt her teeth when she did come, in rolling waves that coursed through her body, gradually subsiding to give way to a scarlet flush that colored her skin, from her chest right up to her cheeks. It gave her a different kind of raw beauty.
‘Hotch,’ she panted his name, ready for her second round. He was happy to oblige, moving over her so that they were face-to-face again, whereupon she kissed his mouth and hummingly approved of the taste of herself mingled with his.
It was incredible how humbling bodily functions could be: sweat and tears, saliva, and other fluids; breath that was hard to control, reactions that were automatic. When you stripped anyone bare and shared all of this with them, it was solidarity, even without the sex.
He inched inside her, and this time he took a moment to just feel the snug sensation of her, tight about him. She whimpered.
‘Hey there Chief,’ she whispered to him, through half-lidded eyes, drunk with contentment.
‘Hi,’ he whispered back, unused to sharing the intimacies of conversation and physicality with another. He wasn’t much of a talker.
He kissed her hard to shut her up, and began to move inside her at the same time.
‘For someone who doesn’t get laid very often, you’re pretty good at this,’ she groaned against his stubbly cheek
‘How do you know?’ He could barely muster the breath to speak, but at least it would distract him. Lord knows he needed distracting: he was right on the verge of…
‘Know what?’ she asked impatiently.
‘If I get laid very often?’
He stopped momentarily to look at her.
‘I just know, Hotch. Work means a lot to you.’ She said it like it was a bad thing.
‘You trying to kill the passion, Prentiss?’ he asked wryly, resuming the fuck, his balls slapping pleasantly against her ass.
‘Hmmm, I like this kind of passion…’
After that they were both gasping and incoherent. She came quickly again, still sensitive after his earlier attention, and he followed soon after, hard and fast, pumping erratically until ever last drop of cum was released from his body. He managed to quieten a moan to something that sounded like a soft cough, and she bit his shoulder again - hard - but he didn’t give a damn.
He rested inside her, leaning forward on his forearms until he felt himself going soft, and slipped out.
A feeling of immense satisfaction and momentary peace washed over him. He didn’t resist her arms as they wrapped around him and cradled his head to her chest. La petite mort. A piece of him had died and gone to heaven. The most awful thing was knowing the satisfaction wouldn’t last. It would be replaced with guilt and self-admonishment.
***
The next morning, he didn’t resist her pawing at him for some sleepy sex around dawn, allowing her to take the lead and straddle him for a quick one with few preliminaries or pleasantries. Allowing himself to doze for half an hour after, he rose before her, showered, shaved, and changed. He inspected the marks she left - nothing that would show.
She was brushing out her tangled bed hair when he came out of the bathroom.
‘Morning,’ she yawned.
‘Morning. I’m going to head downstairs and see what’s happening,’ he told her, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Damn, he could compartmentalize better than she did.
‘Okay, I’ll follow soon. I just need to hop in the shower.’
He nodded, standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets.
‘Are you…alright?’ That was all he could think of to ask. It always sounded dumb, but he always said it anyway.
‘Don’t worry, Hotch, I don’t want forever or anything domestic. I’m not the Martha Stewart type.’
‘I didn’t think you were.’
He was as infuriated with her now as he had been the evening before, when she insisted that they share a room. Nothing had changed.
'Bitch', was his last thought right before he smoothed down his hair, clenched his jaw, and went down to meet the team for breakfast wearing his polished Hotchner mask.
‘I like this side of you,’ she said as he turned his back. ‘It’s a completely different beast.’
He closed the room door firmly behind him and walked quickly down the hall.