#cmladies

Warning: Angst!  Not sure if this will have a happy ending!  I mostly write happy stories, but somehow this took on a life of its own.  I could call this “Chapter One,” but that would imply there’s more to come, and I’m not sure there is...

Disclaimer: Characters don’t belong to me.

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Emily Prentiss was sitting on her couch with JJ’s head resting in her lap, and was sleepily trailing her fingers through the woman’s blond hair.  The movie had been over for 45 minutes, the beer bottles on the coffee table emptied long ago.  They had been resting like this, in a companionable silence, for long enough that Emily’s leg was starting to go numb under the weight of JJ’s head, yet moving was the last thing she wanted to do.

JJ sighed.  “Things haven’t been so great with Will lately,” she said, her voice startling Emily in the silence.

“Yeah?” Emily replied, her voice neutral.

“Yeah,” JJ said.  “I don’t know what it is.  He spends plenty of time with me, and he’s saying all the right things, but it’s just… I don’t know.  When we’re in bed, it’s like he’s not really there with me.  He…”  JJ kept going, suddenly going into way too much detail.

“JJ, stop,” Emily interrupted.  JJ quickly sat up, turning to face her.  “What is it, Em?”

“I can’t…talk with you about this.”

JJ looked at her with her brow furrowed.  Her eyes looked genuinely confused.  “Are you okay?  What…?”

Now Emily sighed.  “It’s not right,” she said.  There was a moment of silence, then JJ’s cheeks turned slightly pink, whether from embarrassment or anger, she wasn’t sure.

“Whatever happened to ‘you know you can talk to me about anything, Jennifer’?  No topic’s ever been off limits between us.  I know things about you no one else does.  I’ve told you secrets I’ve never told anyone.  What the hell, Em.  You’re my best friend!”

Emily snorted.  

JJ’s eyebrow shot up.  “Are you saying you’re not my best friend?”

Emily stared at the younger woman.  “Seriously, JJ?!”  She couldn’t believe JJ could honestly be this thick-headed.  “Yes, we talk about many topics.  But you seriously can’t see why I’m unable to listen to you talk about your boyfriend’s dick?”

Emily’s words, and the dangerous spark in her eyes, made JJ flush a deeper shade of red.  For a moment she said nothing.

“Emily, I…” she tried, trailing off, suddenly fixated on picking a stray thread from the throw blanket on her lap.  On both of their laps.  Oh, please don’t do this.

Emily saw the distress on JJ’s face, and her voice softened slightly as she tentatively reached out to touch the other woman’s forearm.

“Of course I’m your best friend.  But I can’t give you advice about repairing things with your boyfriend, and I absolutely cannot talk with you about your sexual relationship with him, and you must understand that.”  Emily’s voice was firm, but wavered when she muttered as an afterthought, “Maybe things would be better with Will if you were with him right now, instead of me.  Maybe you should be having this conversation with him.”

JJ’s blue eyes swam with too many emotions to name.  “What are you saying?” she asked, not wanting to hear an answer.  Subconsciously, she leaned even closer to the other woman.

“I’m saying, JJ, that maybe we shouldn’t keep doing this.”  Emily’s head was tilted slightly down.  “It isn’t right.”  She hated herself for saying it.  She wanted nothing more to keep going with JJ.  But her therapist had been trying for at least four months to get Emily to admit that she and JJ were having an “emotional affair” (at first, Emily scoffed at the ridiculous term) and that the mature, ethical course of action for Emily would be to end it.  Emily’s inability to do so was a sign of weakness.  And Emily was not weak.  She met JJ’s gaze.

But JJ surprisingly, maddeningly, played dumb.  “What are you talking about?” she replied, her voice a bit too desperate.  “We’re not doing anything wrong!”

Emily raised a pointed eyebrow.

“Em, we’re not… it’s not like we… I mean, we haven’t even…”

Unable to take it, Emily raised her voice.  “Finish the sentence, Jareau!  We haven’t even WHAT?”

JJ’s eyes widened.  She opened her mouth to speak, but Emily cut her off.  “What haven’t we done?  Were you going to say, we haven’t even kissed?”

Now the blood drained from JJ’s face.  Her eyes darted this way and that, and Emily could tell she wanted to bolt, but no, they had danced around this one too many times.  She wasn’t going to let JJ continue this facade.  She couldn’t let JJ keep pretending to not know.

“Was that what you were going to say?” Emily asked again, her voice dangerously low.  But she didn’t give the other woman a chance to speak.  “Or were you thinking, maybe, of all the other things we haven’t even done?  Were you thinking that it’s okay that you come running to me to talk about things you can never talk with your boyfriend about, or that it’s okay that you sleep in my arms when we’re sharing hotel rooms, because we’ve never…”

JJ’s breath hitched, but Emily kept going. “…We’ve never slept naked or anything.  We’ve never talked about that time when I woke up to realize you were sleeping with my breast in your hand.”

JJ made a strangled sound, and looked away.  Emily saw her tears anyway.  The words kept gushing out.

“Yeah, JJ, maybe we’re okay, because we’ve never dared to twine our legs together in bed the way we do on the dance floor; we’ve never talked about the fact that when you wear that skirt to work - you know the one - my nipples get hard and you try not to stare but fail miserably; you’ve never cried out my name to the heavens; I’ve never had to get in bed with my vibrator the moment you’ve left my house; we’ve never - ”

“Emily, please,” JJ begged, now crying outright.  Emily’s eyes welled up, too, and she knew she was being an asshole, but oh god, she couldn’t stop.  Her voice was barely above a whisper.

“We’ve never been alone in the interrogation room with the blinds drawn and the door locked, with you against the table, skirt hiked up…begging me to add another finger.”

“EMILY, STOP!!!” JJ let out, and broke down sobbing.  Emily stopped talking, and sat stalk still as she watched JJ fall apart.  “I can’t believe you just said all that,” was all JJ could manage through her tears, but she made no effort to correct or deny anything that Emily had said.  Emily wasn’t surprised.  Nor was she surprised when JJ abruptly gathered up her purse and jacket and car keys, and fled from Emily’s house.

* * *

Lying alone in bed that night, in the arms of insomnia, Emily heaved a sigh and suddenly felt like punching her own self in the face.  What had she done?  When her therapist had told her she needed to end the emotional affair with JJ, this was not the method he’d had in mind, Emily was sure.  Emily had been filled with so much guilt and shame, for being so head-over-heels for a woman who had a boyfriend and was also a co-worker, that her guilt and shame had become a weapon she bludgeoned JJ into silence with.  Oh, God, what had she done?  How could she have been so cruel?  After having spent months in limbo with JJ, craving her, too weak and cowardly to step away from the woman like she knew she should, Emily went right off the opposite deep end and sent JJ running for the hills.  Had she ruined their friendship for good?  Hell, was one of them going to end up quitting the BAU over this?

JJ ended up calling out sick for two days.  When she came back, Emily put her poker face on to hide the fact that she was so scared she felt like vomiting, and JJ matched her poker face with one of her own.  JJ interacted with Emily in a completely professional way, with an edge of iciness that of course their colleagues noticed but studiously pretended to ignore.

With a mere nine minutes left until wheels up, Emily hastily emailed her therapist to request an increase to two sessions per week, then shut down her computer, took a deep breath, and hoisted her bag onto her shoulder.  

𝐒𝐒𝐀 𝐄𝐥𝐥𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲

“Contrary to popular belief, there has never been a proven case of Satanic ritual killing. Never a verified human sacrifice.

Having said that, there have been isolated cases of animal sacrifice. And many, many cases of vandalism in the name of Satan."

𝟏.𝟏𝟗 : ❝𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐦𝐨❞

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