Archive of Our Own

Three nights.

Emily had counted them at first the way she counted everything — clinical, cataloguing, the way she might count witnesses or witnesses' lies — and she was counting them now because counting was the only thing her mind would still do. The room was the same room she had checked into four days ago. The bedspread was the same color. The light from the parking lot came in around the curtain the same way. Nothing in the room had changed and everything in her had, and the disproportion of it was making her stupid.

She had been in the bed maybe an hour. Maybe two. She had not taken her watch off. She had taken her boots off and her jacket off and her belt off and gotten under the cover fully dressed otherwise, because undressing required a sequence of decisions and she did not have any decisions left. The card had been hours ago. The card was still happening. She could close her eyes and watch JJ slide it out of her wallet with two fingers — the business card, the standard issue, Jennifer Jareau, Supervisory Special Agent, Behavioral Analysis Unit, the embossed shield, the office number Emily had memorized her first week — and offer it across the space between them at the angle of a woman offering a cigarette. Despite what you may have heard. JJ had said it with her chin tipped a half-degree down and her mouth doing the thing it did when she was about to be pleased with herself. Cell phones can be very good for your health. LaMontagne had laughed. He had pocketed the card without looking at it, the way a man pockets a thing he intends to take out later in private, and JJ had turned, and JJ had seen Emily across the way, and JJ's face had not changed.

That was the part Emily kept coming back to. JJ's face had not changed. She had not flinched or smoothed her expression or done any of the small adjustments a person makes when they are caught. She had only looked, and looked away, as if Emily were a streetlight she had registered and stopped registering.

Three nights.

The first had been Galveston, and Emily had not known it was the first. She had thought it was just a night. They had landed at the airfield mid-afternoon and picked up a rental and Morgan had driven and Emily had ridden, and they had done what they had come to do, and on the drive back from the fiancée's they had been working it.

It had been Morgan who had said it first. He had been driving with one wrist over the top of the wheel, the way Morgan drove when his hands were idle and his mind was not, and he had been thinking aloud about the bar-hopping, how the friends had never seen anything, and Emily had been turning it over with him — how could their friends not see anything — and then Morgan had said it's like when the lion preys upon antelope, and Emily had said you lost me, and Morgan had grinned, and Morgan had said:

Well, that's because you, Emily Prentiss, have never been one of the antelope.

It had been a compliment. He had meant it as one and Emily had taken it as one — Emily-the-predator, Emily-who-walks-into-the-room-and-the-room-rearranges-around-her — and she had laughed and said oh, scratch that, you've totally lost me, and Morgan, encouraged, had built the metaphor out: the antelope travel in packs, the lion sits and waits, the lion waits for one of the antelope to break away from its herd, so that when she's alone, vulnerable, and completely unprotected — Morgan's exact phrasing, that triad, alone, vulnerable, and completely unprotected — that's when the lioness strikes. That's when she makes her move.

Emily had said wait a minute, her move?

And Morgan had said it. There's only one thing that's gonna make a straight man leave his friends on guys' night out, and it'll make him leave every time. What's the only temptation that's gonna lure these men away from each other?

And Emily had said: a woman.

Morgan had pulled the rental over.

He had stopped on the shoulder of a two-lane and put it in park and said I have to call her, and Emily had said yeah, and he had put it on speaker because his hands were full of the case file.

The line had clicked over and JJ's voice had come through tinny and a half-second behind itself, and Morgan had said the unsub's a woman, and JJ had said what, and Morgan had said I'm telling you, JJ, she's a woman, we just put it together — LaMontagne needs to be informed, and there had been a beat — half a second, maybe less — and JJ had said yeah, he's right here with me.

He's right here with me.

Emily had been looking at the rearview mirror. She remembered that. She had been looking at her own face in the rearview mirror, half cut off by the angle, and Morgan had said put him on then and JJ had handed the phone over and Detective LaMontagne's voice had come on saying say that again, and Morgan had said it again, and the call had gone on, and Emily had not moved her eyes from the mirror because she had not wanted Morgan to look at her face and see anything in it that she had not yet decided was there.

The thing was not the Will. The Will was fine. Detective LaMontagne would have been more correct in the third week of a working relationship with a local cop they barely knew, but JJ used first names, JJ had always used first names, Will was a man whose name was Will and JJ had said his name. That was not the thing.

The thing was the right here. JJ had not said he's here. JJ had not said the detective is in earshot or Will's at the table or any of the half-dozen phrasings she had at her disposal. JJ had said he's right here with me, and the right here was a locator that did not belong to the working relationship JJ and LaMontagne had been having for three days — right here placed him in her booth, at her shoulder, inside the radius of her body — and Emily, who had spent three months learning the registers of JJ's voice in the dark, had heard it the way a musician hears a note half a step off.

She had not heard it consciously. She had heard it the way you hear a thing you are not yet ready to know.

They had driven back to the airfield. Morgan had talked, on the drive — Morgan had been keyed up the way Morgan got when a profile cracked open under his hands, full of the new theory, working it out loud — and Emily had answered him in the small noises she made when she was tracking but not contributing, and Morgan had not noticed, because Morgan was talking with the part of himself that did not require Emily to be talking back. The jet had been waiting. They had boarded. The cabin lights had been low. The jet had taken off into a Texas dusk and Emily had sat across from Morgan in the small leather seat and put her case file open in her lap and looked at the same page of it for forty minutes without reading a sentence.

Morgan had fallen asleep against the window twenty minutes in. Emily had not.

She had watched the dark of Louisiana come up under the wing. She had heard the engine. She had heard her own breathing under the engine. She had heard, in the place behind her ribs where she did not yet have a name for what was happening, the half-second of pause before JJ had said he's right here with me, on a loop, the loop tightening every time it played.

They had landed in NOLA before sunrise. The black SUV at the airfield had driven them to the hotel and Emily had gone up to her room and gotten into the shower at four-thirty in the morning and stood under it long enough that the small hotel water heater had given up on her, and gotten out, and put on the t-shirt and pajama pants she had been carrying in her go-bag, and gotten into the bed.

It had been almost five.

She had set the alarm for seven. She had had two hours. She had lain in the bed on her back with the light from the parking lot coming in around the curtain — the same parking lot, the same curtain, the same light she would still be looking at three nights later — and she had not slept. She had not slept for two hours straight. She had heard the ice machine cycle. She had heard the elevator chime. She had heard, somewhere down the hall, a door open and close, and she had — stupid Emily, profiler Emily, Emily who knew better — listened for whether the door had been JJ's.

It had not been JJ's. JJ had been three doors down, asleep, or pretending to be, JJ's phone presumably on her nightstand with one not-yet-existing call on it from Louisiana.

That had been the first night.

Emily turned her head on the pillow. The clock on the nightstand said 2:47. She had been in the bed long enough that her left arm had gone numb from the wrist down and she had not noticed. She moved it and the blood came back into it with a kind of sting that was almost pleasant. Almost. The HVAC clicked off and the room went quiet enough that she could hear the ice machine three doors down, the elevator chime two floors up, the distant single car on the access road. She listened. She knew what she was listening for. She had been listening for it for three days.

She closed her eyes again.

Three months ago there had been the dogs, the drugs, Reid. JJ too terrified to admit she was terrified.

That had pulled them close. The moment Emily's voice had anchored JJ back in the moment in that barn. She had not even realized the proximity as it was closing.

And then, weeks later, Garcia's birthday. The bar. JJ in a white shirt at the rail with a stranger's hand on her elbow, and the way her ponytail had swung when she laughed.

The lion preys upon the antelope. The antelope travel in packs, and the lion sits and waits, and the lion waits for one of the antelope to break away from her herd, so that when she's alone, vulnerable, and completely unprotected — Morgan's exact words, three days ago, in a rental car on a Texas side road — that's when the lioness strikes. That's when she makes her move.

She had not been the one with the teeth.

She had been the antelope. She had been the antelope the whole time. She had broken from the herd three months ago without knowing she was breaking from anything, and the lion had been gentle with her, the lion had been very gentle, the lion had taken her time — but Emily had been alone, vulnerable, completely unprotected, and the lion had made her move.

It had been Garcia's birthday, or close to it. A Friday. A bar in Dupont Circle that Garcia had picked because Garcia picked all the bars, the way Garcia made all the decisions about group joy because she alone among them had not had it beaten out of her. The booth had been small. The drinks had been pink. JJ had finished one and then another and had stood up and announced that she was going to get the next round because Emily and Garcia were both being slow, and had left them at the booth and gone to the rail to wait, and had not come back.

Garcia was talking. Garcia was talking about something — Kevin, possibly, or a show she had been watching, or the new arrangement of cubicles on the floor below theirs — and Emily was listening with the part of her brain that managed listening and watching JJ with the rest.

JJ at the rail had been a category of object Emily had not, until that night, classified. Emily had seen JJ flirt. Emily had been in bars with JJ before. JJ was a woman who flirted the way other women breathed, idle and constant and not particularly aimed, the small currency of being a beautiful woman in a public place. That was not what JJ was doing at the rail.

JJ at the rail was working.

She had her elbow on the brass. She had her body angled three-quarters toward the bartender, the open quarter calibrated to receive whoever came up beside her, and the first man who came up beside her got the angle and got the smile and got the laugh at something he had not said anything particularly funny to deserve. JJ touched his forearm. Not for long. Just long enough. She tipped her chin a half-degree down and looked at him from under her lashes and said something Emily couldn't hear, and he leaned in to hear it again, and JJ let him lean.

Emily watched her ponytail swing. JJ had pulled her hair up before they left the apartment, casual and high, the way a woman pulls her hair up when she has decided she is going to be young tonight, and the blonde of it caught the bar light when she moved her head and the seam between the girlish ponytail and the woman delivering the angle at the rail was the thing Emily could not look away from.

She's practiced.

The thought arrived fully formed. Emily registered it the way she registered the unsub habits she pulled out of crime scenes — not as suspicion, not as accusation, but as data. JJ at the rail was practiced. JJ at the rail had done this before. JJ at the rail had a repertoire, and Emily was watching her run a routine she had been running for years, and the routine was good — the routine was very good — and Emily, who knew what JJ's voice sounded like when she was tired, did not know what JJ's voice sounded like at the rail.

She's done this? How many times has she? How many more times will she?

It was the concern of a woman who watched other women for a living and who had just seen something about a friend she did not know how to integrate. JJ was performing. JJ was performing well. JJ was performing in a way that suggested JJ had performed this exact set of gestures across an unknown number of bars and an unknown number of men and the unknown was the part Emily could not bear.

The man at the rail bought JJ a drink. JJ accepted it. She did not drink it. She held it by the rim with two fingers and angled her body another quarter-turn open and the next man came up on her other side, and JJ took the new angle without putting the first man down, and Emily, watching, thought: she does not know she is doing this. she has been doing this for so long she does not know.

Then Garcia said Em, and Emily turned, and Garcia was looking at her with an expression that meant Garcia had said her name three times.

"Sorry," Emily said. "I was — sorry. What?"

"JJ's been gone forever."

"Yeah."

"Should we save her?"

Emily looked back at the rail. JJ had a third man on her now, the first two laughing at the new one's joke, the bartender finally setting four drinks on the bar with a look at JJ that was the bartender's professional read of what JJ was doing and the cost of it. JJ paid. JJ had not let any of the men pay, in the end, which Emily noted: she had taken the offered drink but bought the round herself. The performance had a rule.

"I'll get her," Emily said.

"You're a saint."

"I'm not."

"You are."

Emily slid out of the booth. The bar was crowded. The route to the rail required her to turn sideways twice and apologize once and step around a man whose elbow was at the height of her ribs, and the whole short walk took maybe twelve seconds, and in those twelve seconds Emily watched JJ from a new angle and the new angle was worse.

From the side, the performance had texture. Emily could see the set of JJ's shoulders, the way she held her left wrist a little turned-out, the angle of her hip against the brass. She could see the small involuntary thing JJ's mouth did between laughs — a half-second of nothing, a flat line, before the smile came back on. She could see JJ's eyes when JJ looked away from the men to take a sip of the drink she was not drinking, and JJ's eyes were empty. Not bored. Not even tired. Empty, the way a room is empty when nobody has been in it for a while, and the emptiness sat there in JJ's face for the space of a swallow and then JJ turned back to the men and the room was full again.

Emily put her hand on the small of JJ's back.

"Hey, Pen needs us back," she said, easy, the voice she used at crime scenes when she was lying about something to put a witness at rest. "She's threatening to order shots and I think you and I both know what shots do to her."

JJ turned. The performance turned with her — turned to Emily and almost did not break, almost stayed in place — and then JJ's eyes registered who was looking at her, and the performance stuttered, just for a beat, just long enough that Emily could see the woman underneath, and the woman underneath was so tired she could barely stand up.

JJ closed her eyes for half a second. Opened them. Said, "Boys, I have to go save my friend."

The men protested. The men were charming about it. JJ was charming back. She handed Emily one of the four drinks and kept one for herself and left two on the bar and said something with her shoulder that made the three of them laugh, and Emily walked them both back to the booth with her hand still at the small of JJ's back and her thumb pressing very gently into the place where JJ's spine curved, the way you press the place where a person has been hurt without telling them you know.

JJ said in her ear, almost too quiet to hear, "Thank you."

Emily said, "I got you."

JJ did not say anything else for a while.

The rest of the night Emily watched JJ from the booth side and let Garcia talk and matched JJ drink for drink and did not match JJ's energy — Emily had stopped matching JJ's energy at the rail and had not turned it back on — and somewhere around midnight Garcia announced that her Kevin had texted her be safe and she was going to take the offered safety personally and head home, and JJ said we should go too, and Emily said I'll drive you, and JJ said you don't have to, and Emily said I know.

JJ did not argue.

Out on the curb Garcia hugged them both — Garcia hugged hard, the way Garcia did everything — and got into a cab. JJ stood with her hands in the pockets of her jacket and looked down the street toward the lit windows of the next bar over, and Emily looked at her and said, "Where's your car?"

"I took a cab."

"Okay. Mine's two blocks."

They walked. JJ did not put her arm through Emily's, did not lean on her, did not touch her at all — JJ was sober enough to walk a straight line, JJ had never been the drunk Emily had pretended to Garcia that she was — and Emily, walking next to her, was acutely aware of the gap between them, the maybe four inches of cold March air, the careful coordination of pace. JJ was tracking her own footing. JJ was a woman walking carefully, not because she was drunk, but because she was tired in a way that required attention.

At the car JJ said, "I'm sorry."

"For what."

"For tonight. For saving me. I —"

"You didn't make me do anything I didn't want to do." Emily unlocked the doors. "Get in."

JJ got in.

The drive to JJ's apartment was twelve minutes and Emily counted them. They didn't talk. Emily kept the radio low. JJ had her head against the window for most of it and her eyes open and her hands very still in her lap, and Emily kept her eyes on the road because if she kept her eyes on the road she would not have to decide what her face was doing. She had not yet, in the car, named the thing she had been watching at the rail. She had it in her, the data — practiced, empty, tired underneath the performance, the small involuntary flatline of JJ's mouth between smiles — and she was not yet ready to compile it into a profile. She drove. She kept the speed legal. JJ watched the city go by.

JJ's building was a narrow brick row in a quiet block off Wisconsin. Emily found a spot half a block down and turned the engine off and the silence in the car was the loudest thing about the drive. JJ did not move for a few seconds. Then she put her hand on the door handle and said, "Walk me up?"

"Yeah."

"It's stupid. I do it every night by myself."

"Walk you up."

They got out. The street was empty except for a man walking a dog at the other end of the block, the small white shape of the dog jerking on its lead. JJ's heels clicked on the sidewalk in a careful even rhythm. Emily, who had on the boots she wore at work, made almost no sound at all. They climbed the four steps to JJ's stoop and JJ took her keys out of her pocket and Emily stood one step below her on the stoop, watching JJ's back, watching the ponytail at the nape of JJ's neck where some of it had come loose during the drive and a few strands lay against her skin.

JJ put the key in the lock. She didn't turn it.

She stood there for a second with her hand on the key and her shoulders very still, and Emily knew, the way she had known at the booth that something was wrong, that JJ was about to turn around.

JJ turned around.

The hotel HVAC came on. Emily opened her eyes.

For a moment the ceiling above her was not the ceiling above her — she had been close enough to the memory that her body had been on a stoop in Georgetown three months ago — and then the hotel reasserted itself, the parking-lot light coming in around the curtain, the small red eye of the smoke detector, the seam in the wallpaper she had not noticed until she had been in this room for three days. Her left hand was on her sternum. Her right hand had come up sometime in the last ten minutes and was now lying open against the pillow next to her face, palm up, like a hand that had been asking for something.

She did not, right away, put it back down.

She had not told the memory honestly even to herself. She had skipped a step. She always skipped the step. The step was what Emily had been doing, standing on the second step of JJ's stoop, watching JJ's hand on the key in the lock. She had been standing very still. She had been standing very still and she had not, in any deliberate way, been waiting for the night to end. The night was ending. JJ's key was in the lock. Any second now JJ would turn the key and go up the stairs and Emily would walk back to her car and drive home and the night would be over. That was the next move. That was the obvious next move.

Emily had not, on the second step, taken her hand off the railing. Emily had not turned to go. Emily had been standing there with her boots planted and her body angled half toward the door and half toward the street, and the half toward the door had been doing more weight-bearing than the half toward the street, and she had not — in any way she could have named at the time — known what she was doing.

She had been waiting.

She had not known what for. She had only known that her body had not yet decided to leave, and JJ had been at the door with her back to her, and JJ had been not turning the key, and the not-turning had been the only data Emily had — but the data had been enough to keep her standing there, and she had stood there, and JJ had turned around.

She was, now, three months later, in a hotel room in New Orleans, with JJ three doors down or not three doors down, with JJ in her own room or not in her own room, with JJ at LaMontagne's place or not at LaMontagne's place — she was, now, almost able to say to herself the small thing she had not said on the stoop. Almost. She got close to it and pulled back the way she had been pulling back at the edge of every honest thought for three days. The closest she got was: I had not left.

That was as far as she could let it go.

She turned her face into the pillow. The pillow smelled like hotel laundry and the back of her own neck. The ice machine clicked. Somewhere in the building a door closed, and the sound traveled up through the floor and into her, and her body — her stupid, ridiculous, trained body — went still listening for whether the closing door was JJ's.

It was not. The footsteps did not come. They went the other way down the hall and faded into the carpet and were gone, and Emily lay in the dark with her face in the pillow and her hand still open against the bed, and she thought: the second night. think about the second night. it will hurt less than the first.

It did not hurt less.

The second night had been here, in this hotel, last night. She had come back from Galveston pre-dawn — the jet, the SUV, the shower, the two hours staring at the ceiling — and the day had been the day of the canvas. They had split the Quarter into pairs and walked it from afternoon into dark, hunting a woman who hunted men. Emily had been paired with Gideon. Morgan and Reid. JJ and LaMontagne.

The canvas had been work Emily was good at. She had walked the bars with Gideon and watched the women in them the way she had been trained to watch women in bars — for the ones alone, the ones angled open, the ones whose smiles did not reach their eyes — and she had done the job and Gideon had nodded at her three times in three hours, which was the Gideon equivalent of a commendation. She had not, while she was walking the Quarter, let herself think about the fact that JJ was walking some other stretch of it on LaMontagne's arm. She had not let herself think about it because thinking about it would have made her bad at her job, and Emily was not bad at her job, and so she had simply not thought about it, the way you simply do not look at a thing in your peripheral vision when looking at it would require you to stop driving.

She had looked at JJ once. In a precinct hallway. JJ had been at a coffee station and JJ had handed her a cup without looking at her and said good, and Emily had taken the cup and said thanks, and that had been the whole of the conversation, and Emily had thought, walking back to the bullpen, that was nothing.

That had been nothing.

She had not told herself yet that nothing was the new word for what they were.

By the end of the day they were close enough on the case to taste it but not close enough to close it, and the team had eaten in the precinct conference room and gone back to the hotel near midnight, and Emily had taken the longest shower of her adult life and gotten into the bed in a t-shirt and turned off the light and lay there waiting.

She had not consciously been waiting. She had been not sleeping, which she now understood, in retrospect, to have been waiting. JJ came to her room at the ends of cases. JJ had come to her room at the ends of every case for two months. JJ would knock — three soft knocks, JJ's knock, the one Emily had learned the way you learn the cadence of a person's footfall — and Emily would open the door and JJ would be on the other side in whatever JJ slept in, and they would not, in the doorway, say very much, and JJ would come in.

JJ did not come.

Emily lay in the dark for the first hour and made the case for it being nothing. JJ was tired. The case had been long. JJ had a great deal of paperwork to do before they could close out tomorrow. JJ might have fallen asleep with her clothes on, the way JJ sometimes did when she got back to a hotel room and sat down on the bed to take her shoes off and then did not get back up. Any of those. Any of those.

Emily lay in the dark for the second hour and her mind went to LaMontagne.

LaMontagne and JJ had been having dinner. JJ had told Emily this in passing, the way you tell a colleague a thing, the way JJ would have told Hotch or Morgan: I'm getting dinner with LaMontagne, going over what we have, see you in the morning. JJ had said it standing in the precinct doorway with her jacket over her arm and her bag on her shoulder, and Emily had said okay, and JJ had said don't wait up, and Emily had laughed because the line was a joke between them, the kind of line you don't think about until later when you go through the conversation in your head and discover that the joke was the only true thing in it.

Don't wait up.

JJ had said it lightly. JJ had said it the way JJ said all the lines she had practiced in her head before she got to them, the way Emily was now, in retrospect, finally able to recognize as JJ's voice when JJ was lying. JJ had told Emily not to wait up, and the telling had been for Emily, and Emily had laughed, and Emily was lying in the dark now thinking: if it was nothing she would not have told me not to wait up. she told me not to wait up because she knew I would.

She turned over. The hotel pillow held the shape of her head and she could not get a fresh part of it to rest her cheek against. She put her hand flat on the wall behind the bed. The wall was warm. The wall vibrated, very faintly, with the HVAC of the next room over, and Emily — Emily who had a master's degree from Yale and clearance high enough to read other people's confessions for breakfast — pressed her palm into the wall like a teenager waiting for a sign through the drywall, and got nothing, and took her hand back, and put it under her own cheek.

He's right here with me.

The line surfaced fully then. It had been in her since Galveston. She had been listening to it for thirty hours without acknowledging she was hearing it, and now in the dark of the second night with JJ not knocking, it played itself the whole way through. Yeah, he's right here with me. The half-second of pause before JJ said it. The right here, the small precise locator that placed Will in the radius of her body, the grammatical tell. Emily turned it over in her hands the way she turned over a piece of evidence, and the more she turned it the more it became what she had known it was the moment JJ had said it.

It was not, strictly, a sexual statement. JJ had not said I am sleeping with him. JJ had not said anything explicit. JJ had said two short locators in one phone call thirty hours ago and Emily was, now, lying alone in the dark, building a building on them.

The thing was, Emily built buildings on prepositions for a living. The thing was, Emily was good at it. The thing was, Emily had built buildings on less and been right.

The third hour came and went. Emily did not sleep. She listened to the air conditioning and the ice machine and the elevator and her own breathing, and somewhere around five in the morning the light started to come gray at the edges of the curtain, and Emily watched the gray happen and did not move, and the sound of JJ's knock did not come, and the second night ended without Emily ever having known whether JJ had been in her own room or somewhere else.

That was the part that had broken something. Not the not-coming. The not-knowing. JJ had given Emily three months of always knowing where JJ was at this hour, and JJ had taken it away in one night, and the absence had a weight. It was the weight of a person who had been carrying the knowledge of another person's location and had only realized she was carrying it when the knowledge stopped.

Emily had gotten up at six and showered and put on her work clothes and gone down to the lobby for coffee, and JJ had been in the lobby for coffee, and JJ had said morning, and Emily had said morning, and they had ridden the same elevator back up to their floor without saying anything else, and the elevator had felt to Emily like a small lit box she had been trapped in with a stranger, and JJ had gotten off on the floor and walked toward her room and Emily had walked toward hers and they had not, either of them, looked back.

That had been last night and then this morning.

Today had been the card.

The hotel ice machine cycled. Emily counted the seconds between the click and the dropping of the ice into the bin: seventeen. She had counted it before. It had not changed. It would not change. She lay on her back with her hands now both on her sternum, fingers interlaced, the body laid out, and she let her mind come back to JJ's apartment three months ago because the alternative was thinking about the door at the end of the hall and the door at the end of the hall was not going to open.

JJ had turned around on the stoop.

JJ had turned around on the stoop.

She had turned, and she had looked at Emily for a long second, and her face in the streetlight had been the face Emily had not been able to see from across the bar — the face under the performance, the face that had been at the rail for two hours pretending it was somewhere else. Her hair had been half-loose. Her lipstick had been most of the way gone. Her eyes had been wet at the edges, not crying, just wet, the way eyes are wet when they have been keeping a thing in for hours and the thing is at the surface.

She had said, "I don't want to go inside."

Emily had said, "Okay."

"I don't want to be inside by myself."

"Okay."

JJ had held her eyes for one beat longer than the conversation had asked for. Then, lower, with a half-step of distance she had not had at the bar:

"You don't have to come up."

"Jen."

JJ had closed her eyes. Jen was a name nobody called her. JJ was the workplace. Jennifer was her mother. Jen was — Jen was a thing Emily had said exactly twice before, once at three in the morning on the jet flying back from a child case in Idaho and once standing in the BAU bathroom with JJ throwing up after a hostage scene, and both times the name had done what it had done now, which was make JJ's face come apart for a second before she put it back together.

JJ had put it back together. Emily had watched it happen in real time, on the stoop, in the streetlight — the small adjustment of mouth, the lift of the chin, the bar voice coming back on — and JJ had turned and put her key in the outer lock and the door of the building had swung in on a dim foyer with a row of brass mailboxes set into the wall and a single overhead bulb at the top of a narrow staircase. JJ had not held the door for Emily. JJ had walked in and let it swing, and Emily had caught it with her hand and followed, and the door had closed behind them with a click that was the first quiet thing of the night.

The stairs were narrow and twelve. Emily counted them. JJ went up first, two steps ahead, her hand on the banister and her ponytail at the level of Emily's eyes for the whole climb. Neither of them spoke. The climb took less than half a minute and it was the most charged silence Emily had ever stood inside.

At the top of the stairs there was a small landing and a single door with a brass 2 on it. JJ crossed to it. She took her second key off her ring and put it in the lock and turned the lock and not, then, opened the door. She stood with her back to Emily and her hand on the key and her forehead almost touching the wood, and she waited there for the space of one slow breath, and then she looked back over her shoulder. The performance had been restored. Her mouth had been doing the thing it did when she was about to be pleased with herself.

"You coming in?"

It had not been a question, exactly. JJ had said it the way she had said boys, I have to go save my friend — bar voice, confident, the angle she had been working at the rail now angled at Emily across the small landing of her own apartment at one in the morning, and Emily — Emily with her hand still on the banister at the top of the stairs — had felt the performance the way you feel a draft, and she had said, the only honest thing she could think of:

"Do you want me to?"

JJ had laughed. Low. A little breathless. She had not turned all the way around.

"That's not a fair question."

"Why isn't it."

"Because if I tell you yes you'll think I'm —" JJ had stopped. She had not finished the sentence. She had turned the rest of the way around now, her back against the closed door, her hands flat behind her on the wood, and the silence between them had stretched the length of a long held breath, and JJ had said, finally, without the performance:

"I want you to."

Emily had crossed the landing.

JJ had caught her by the collar — both hands, the moment Emily was close enough, into the wool of Emily's coat at the lapels and pulling, the way a person pulls a thing toward herself that she has been keeping at a distance for too long — and Emily had come the rest of the way to JJ in a single step, flush against her, JJ's body trapped between Emily's body and the closed door at her back, and JJ had kissed her, hard, with the door behind her and Emily's chest against her chest and the cold March air still on them both, and Emily had — Emily had stood, for a half-second longer than she would later be able to forgive herself for, with her hands at her sides, receiving, because she had not yet understood that what JJ was asking for required Emily to answer.

Then she had understood.

Her hands had come up. One into JJ's hair, where the elastic had been, where the ponytail had been mostly undone already by the wind in the car ride home, the elastic still in place but only barely, the strands of it coming free at the nape. The other at JJ's waist, the small of her back, the place Emily had pressed at the booth. JJ had made a sound at the touch of Emily's hand at her waist — a small sound, an involuntary sound, the kind of sound the body makes when it has been waiting to be touched and has not been letting itself know — and the sound had been the thing that broke Emily's last hesitation.

One of JJ's hands had come off Emily's lapel and gone behind her own back to the doorknob.

The door had given.

It had not given gracefully. JJ had turned the knob with the kiss still in her mouth and her other hand still fisted in Emily's coat, and the door had swung in under her weight and JJ had gone with it — JJ had fallen, backward, the first one through, her body leading the geometry even as it tipped — and Emily had been pulled after her by the fist in her own lapels, into the dim yellow of a small front room JJ had left a single lamp burning in before she went out. JJ stumbled backward across her own threshold with Emily's mouth still on hers and Emily's hand still in her hair, JJ's heels catching once on the rug just inside the door and not stopping her — and Emily had reached behind JJ with the hand that had been at her waist and pushed the door shut with the side of her palm, and the door had clicked closed, and JJ had been laughing into her mouth now, laughing, breathless, a little drunk after all or drunk on something else.

The apartment was narrow and small. A couch and a side table with the lamp. A galley kitchen opening off the front room without a wall between them, the counter facing the door, three or four steps away. JJ pulled Emily backward across them without breaking the kiss, Emily following because Emily was attached to her by the lapels and by the mouth and by some new gravity Emily had not yet named, until the counter had been at JJ's hips.

JJ had said, against Emily's mouth — into Emily's mouth, the way you tell a thing to someone whose body is already against yours — "I want you to do something to me and I want you not to make me say what it is."

"Okay."

JJ had kissed her again. Harder this time. Her teeth had found Emily's bottom lip and her hands had come off Emily's face and gone back to Emily's lapels and pulled, and Emily had hit the counter against JJ's hips with her own thighs and JJ had — finally — taken hold of the back of Emily's neck the way Emily had pressed her thumb into the booth, and the parallel had not been lost on either of them, and JJ had broken the kiss only long enough to put her mouth against Emily's throat and breathe in.

Emily had put her hands on JJ's waist with intent now, with purpose, and lifted, and JJ had gone up onto the counter without any resistance, her legs coming apart for Emily to step between without being asked, and Emily had stepped between, and JJ had locked her ankles behind Emily's back, and Emily had finally — finally — taken hold of the ponytail.

Not pulled. Not yet. Just taken hold, the elastic and the loose strands together in her fist, the weight of JJ's hair in her hand, the angle of JJ's neck rearranging slightly as Emily's grip established itself. JJ had gone still. Her mouth had gone still against Emily's throat. The whole performance — the rail, the bar, the empty eyes, the practiced angle, the you coming in — had stopped on a dime, because Emily had her by the hair, and Emily had her by the hair gently, and JJ — practiced JJ, who-has-done-this-how-many-times JJ — had not been ready for gentle.

JJ had said, very small, against Emily's throat: "Oh."

"Yeah?"

Emily had not pulled. She had held. She had held the way you hold a thing you intend to look at, and JJ — JJ on the counter with her legs locked behind Emily's back and her mouth half-open and her eyes finally fully open looking at Emily for the first time all night — had been seen, and the being-seen had done what no amount of friction had been going to do, which was undo her.

JJ had kissed Emily again. The second kiss had been different. The second kiss had information in it. The second kiss said yes, this, this is what I came home for, and Emily had answered it with her whole body, hand still in JJ's hair, the other hand sliding up under JJ's white shirt and finding the warm skin of JJ's back, and JJ had arched up into the touch and made another small involuntary sound and put her mouth against Emily's throat and breathed in.

Emily had said, "Bedroom?"

JJ had said, "Yes."

JJ had gotten down off the counter. They had not separated for the walk. JJ had not let Emily separate from her — JJ had walked them both backward down a short hallway with her hand fisted in the front of Emily's shirt and her mouth on Emily's mouth — and the bedroom door had been open and the bed had been unmade and JJ had hit the back of her knees on the mattress and sat down hard and pulled Emily down on top of her.

The shirt had come off first. JJ's shirt. The white shirt from the bar that Emily had been watching for two hours from across the room. JJ had gotten Emily's hands on the buttons and Emily had done them one at a time, sitting astride JJ on the bed, JJ propped on her elbows watching Emily's hands, and the watching had been part of it — JJ wanted Emily to see, wanted Emily to take her time, wanted to feel the buttons go one at a time under Emily's fingers, and Emily had given her that. Six buttons. The shirt had fallen open and JJ had not been wearing a bra and the lamp from the hallway had been the only light and JJ's skin in the half-light had been the color of milk.

Emily had set her hand flat between JJ's breasts. Not over either of them. Between. The way you put your hand on a person to say stop for a moment, and JJ had stopped — her chest had stopped rising, just for a second, the breath caught — and Emily had said, "You with me?"

"Are you with me?"

Emily had laughed. It had been the first laugh of the night that had not been social. It had come up out of her like something startled. JJ had laughed too, a small breathless laugh, and Emily had bent down and kissed her again, and the kiss had been — finally — unhurried. They had time. The night was hours yet. Emily was here. JJ was here. Emily had her hand flat between JJ's breasts and her mouth on JJ's mouth and JJ's ponytail spread across the pillow under her, and the room had been quiet, and the city had been quiet, and the kiss had gone on for a long time.

Then JJ had said, "Go down on me."

Emily had started to move down JJ's body. She had gotten as far as JJ's collarbone before JJ had stopped her.

"There's a thing."

Emily had lifted her head and looked at JJ. JJ's face had been at the small confident angle it had been at the rail — not warning, not asking permission, just informing — and Emily had said, "Whatever it is, I'm sure it's fine."

JJ had said, "Down."

Emily had gone down.

She had gone slowly. She had wanted, the whole walk back from the kitchen, to take JJ apart fast, to answer the speed of the kiss at the door with the speed she had been holding back, but JJ had said go down and the go down had been an instruction and Emily had decided to make the instruction last. She had gotten JJ's jeans open. JJ had lifted her hips for Emily to pull them off. JJ's underwear had been black and plain — not bar-night underwear, not for-an-audience underwear, just the underwear of a woman who had not, when she got dressed for the bar, planned for the night to end on her back — and Emily had taken her time getting them off too. Hooked her thumbs at JJ's hips. Pulled them down JJ's thighs at the pace of someone unwrapping a thing carefully because the wrapping was part of it. JJ had lifted her hips again. The underwear had come off her ankles and Emily had let them fall off the side of the bed.

She had set her hands on JJ's thighs, just above the knees, and pushed them open. JJ had let them go. JJ had let everything go. JJ on her back in her own bed with her shirt open and her hair coming out of its elastic and her hands flat against the sheets on either side of her had been the most undefended thing Emily had ever seen in her life, and Emily had bent her head and put her mouth at the inside of JJ's knee and worked her way up, slow, an inch at a time, her hands pressing JJ's thighs wider as she went.

She had felt JJ's breathing change before she got there. Long before. JJ had been making small involuntary sounds against the back of her own hand — Emily had glanced up once and seen JJ with the side of her fist pressed to her mouth, watching Emily move up her thigh, eyes half-shut — and the sounds had been the only sounds in the apartment except for Emily's own breathing and the small wet sound of Emily's mouth against JJ's skin.

She had gotten to the crease of JJ's hip. She had paused there. She had wanted JJ to want, wanted JJ to make the small move, wanted JJ to ask — and JJ had, on cue, almost as if Emily had said it out loud, breathed please into the air above her and shifted her hips a half-inch toward Emily's mouth, and Emily — Emily, who had been thinking make her ask — had thought I will never deny her anything, and had moved her mouth the last inch and put it where JJ wanted it.

The first thing Emily had registered was the heat. The second was the wet. The third — half a second behind the others — was something cold against her tongue.

She had stopped.

She had stopped with her mouth still on JJ, her tongue flat against — against a thing that was not skin, that was the size and weight of a small bead, that was metal, warmed by JJ's body but not warm, not the temperature of the rest of her, and Emily — Emily had lifted her head a fraction of an inch and let her tongue investigate, very slowly, the shape of what she was touching.

A ball. A small ball, at the top, just above. Then a bar. Then — under her tongue, when she traced down — the second ball, smaller, set close to the skin.

A piercing.

Emily had lifted her head all the way up. She had not meant to. She had meant to keep going. But her face had come up off JJ's body almost involuntarily because the thought had been so loud — Jennifer Jareau has her clit pierced — and she had needed to see JJ's face when she had that thought, and she had looked up, and JJ was looking down at her.

JJ's hand had still been at her own mouth. JJ's eyes had been wide and dark and waiting. The whole arch of JJ's body had been waiting. JJ had told Emily there was a thing and had not told her what and had let Emily find it, and the finding was a test, and JJ had been watching Emily take the test, and now Emily had her face wet between JJ's thighs and her hands on JJ's thighs and JJ's piercing tasted of warm metal on her tongue and JJ was looking down at her with the question on her face — and not the question Emily had been expecting. JJ had not been waiting to be reassured. JJ had been waiting to be answered. Her mouth was at the small confident angle it had been at the rail. So. That was the look. So. What are you going to do about it?

Emily had said, "This is a thing."

JJ had let out the breath she had been holding. Half a laugh, half not. "It's a thing."

"How long?"

"A year. Year and a half."

"Em —"

"Jen."

JJ had closed her eyes. The full name again, the one Emily was not supposed to use, and JJ's mouth had come open and her hand had finally come down off her face and gone into Emily's hair at the back of her head, and JJ had said, in a voice Emily had never heard JJ use in her life, "Don't stop."

Emily had not stopped.

She had gone back down. She had put her mouth back where it had been and let her tongue learn the new geography — the bar, the ball at the top, the way the piercing changed the shape of what was under it, the way pressure landed differently against the metal — and JJ had gone immediately, immediately loud, the back of her hand abandoned, her voice coming out of her open and unguarded and not at any volume she would have allowed herself if she had thought about it. The hand at her mouth had come down and gone into Emily's hair at the back of her head and gripped, and the grip had told Emily everything she had needed — where to be, how hard, when to slow — and Emily had read the grip the way she read the rest of JJ.

"Don't be careful with me."

The first thing JJ had said out loud, around her own breathing. Emily had registered the instruction the way you register a thing you have been waiting to be told. She had pressed harder. JJ had made a small yes that had not been at any volume she would have chosen, and Emily had thought oh, and gone harder still, and JJ had said fuck, and there, and just like that, don't stop, don't stop just because I — don't stop —

JJ had not finished the sentence. The not-finishing had been because JJ had been about to come. Emily had felt it gather in JJ's thighs first — the small warning shake at the inside of JJ's knees where Emily had her hands — and then up through JJ's hips, and Emily had not slowed, and had not slowed when JJ's hand in her hair had pulled, and had not slowed when JJ had stopped being able to put words together — Em, oh, Em, oh god — and JJ had come on her tongue with the piercing pressed against the flat of it, and the come had been a long one, longer than Emily would have predicted, JJ's hips moving up into Emily's mouth on every wave the way a person rocks into a thing she does not want to let go of yet.

Emily had ridden it out with her. Mouth on her. Until the last small twitch had gone through JJ's thighs and JJ had — for the first time in what felt like an hour — gone briefly limp against the sheets, her hand in Emily's hair gone almost slack.

Emily had started to lift her head.

JJ had said, "Don't."

"You just —"

"Don't."

It had not been a request. JJ had said it with her hips already lifting again, asking for the next, the hand in Emily's hair coming back to grip, and the don't had been the first true note in JJ's voice all night — not performance, not flirtation, not the constructed line, just the body asking — and Emily had bent her head and given JJ what she had asked for.

The second had been longer. Emily had not rushed it. She had learned, in the first one, which side of the piercing made JJ's breath catch, the small adjustment of angle that brought a sound out of her unbidden, the slow flat broad pressure that made her thighs start to shake. She had put her tongue to the piercing now with intent — flat, broad, holding it like a single note she was trying to keep steady — and JJ had been talking, low, continuous, a stream of half-words Emily had not been able to fully assemble. Fuck, and yes, and please, and somewhere in the middle of it I've wanted, and then nothing else, the I've wanted trailing off into a sound that wasn't a word, and Emily had filed I've wanted in the place she would have to look at later, and kept her mouth on JJ, and brought her through.

The second had taken JJ apart in a way the first had not. JJ had come slower — Emily had felt it build under her tongue for what had to have been longer than two minutes — and the come had rolled into a kind of plateau Emily had not, in her own sexual history, seen another woman occupy. JJ shaking. JJ open-mouthed. JJ's hand in Emily's hair gone strengthless, her other hand fisted in the sheet beside her hip. Emily had eased the pressure for half a second to let JJ catch a breath, and JJ had said, slurred, breathless, "More."

"Jay."

"More."

"You're —"

"More, Em, I can take it."

Emily had given her more.

She had lost count somewhere after that. JJ on her edge again, riding the next one, JJ saying don't stop, JJ saying Em, JJ saying things Emily would not, the next morning, be able to repeat back to herself in the order they had come. Emily had simply kept her mouth on JJ and let JJ tell her with her hips and her hand when to slow and when to go again, and JJ had come a third time and what Emily would later think had been a fourth, the math becoming difficult — and somewhere late, with JJ teetering on a kind of edge Emily had been holding her on with deliberate flat pressure, JJ had pulled at Emily's hair up, pulling Emily off her, and Emily had come up the length of JJ's body on her elbows.

JJ had pulled her down into a kiss that tasted of JJ's own self on Emily's mouth.

She had said, against Emily's mouth, "I want to feel you."

Emily had paused, half a breath, registering the shift. JJ had stopped asking to be handled. JJ was asking, now, for the other thing — for Emily up here, against her, body to body — and Emily had felt the shift the way you feel a draft come in through an opened window.

"I want you up here. Against me."

"Take your pants off."

Emily had laughed once, breathless. "Demanding."

JJ had not laughed. JJ had said, "Take your pants off."

Emily had pushed herself off JJ — sat back on her heels at the foot of the bed, JJ propped on her elbows watching, JJ's chest still rising and falling and the lamp from the hallway catching the wet on her thighs — and undone her own pants. JJ had not looked away. JJ had been watching Emily the way Emily had wanted to be watched all night, and Emily had pulled her shirt over her head in one motion and unhooked her own bra and pushed her underwear and pants down together and gotten back on the bed naked, and JJ had reached up with her teeth still chattering very slightly and pushed the white shirt the rest of the way off her own shoulders, and they had been naked together for the first time in the dim lamp-light of JJ's bedroom.

JJ had pulled Emily down.

"Here," she had said. "Down. With me."

Emily had laid herself flat along JJ's body, hip to hip, chest to chest, mouth to mouth, and JJ had wrapped one leg around Emily's hip and brought the other up over Emily's thigh, and they had — without coordinating it, without anyone saying anything — slotted into the angle, JJ's hip rising into Emily's, the piercing finding Emily's body the way a key finds a lock. Emily had gasped into JJ's mouth at the first touch of cold metal against her own heat. JJ had said yes, and the yes had been the yes of a woman whose body had been waiting for this and had not, until just now, been let. Emily had rocked her hips down — slow, exploratory — and JJ had rocked hers up to meet it, and the first slow grind had been so good Emily had to put her mouth against JJ's neck just to breathe.

They had found the rhythm in three or four pushes. Slow ones. JJ had been so wet from the ones before that the friction had been almost — Emily had not had a word for it — almost too much, almost dangerous, and she had backed the pressure off a quarter and held herself there above JJ on her forearms, and JJ had said immediately, no, harder, like that, like before, do that again, and Emily had done it again, and JJ had pulled her down by the back of the neck and bit her shoulder, hard, the small punishment of a woman who had been kept on an edge for too long.

Emily had felt the piercing on every push. Every push. The metal had warmed against her now but stayed itself, a hard point of contact, the discrete locatable thing between them, the thing they were moving around. She had shifted her hips by a quarter inch, on instinct, looking for the angle that brought the piercing against her own clit, and she had found it, and the finding had punched a sound out of her she had not made on purpose. JJ had made a sound under her that had matched it. They had laughed once, both of them, into each other's mouths.

"There," JJ had said, low. "Stay there. Don't move from there. Just — just like that — slower."

"Jay —"

"Slower."

Emily had gone slower. Slow enough that the friction had taken on a texture she had not had with another woman — the slow drag of the piercing across her own clit, the slower drag of JJ's body underneath with the metal as a fulcrum between them, the way the bar of the piercing moved as JJ's body moved. JJ had been holding herself absolutely still under Emily now except for her hips, which had been moving in tiny precise quarter-thrusts up into Emily's body, and Emily — Emily had understood, on push twelve or thirteen, that JJ was not actually under her. JJ was running this from the bottom. JJ was telling Emily the tempo and the pressure and the angle with each minute movement of her own hips, and Emily was the engine and JJ was the map, and the realization had not slowed her hips but had done something to her chest.

It had built slowly. The slow build had been the thing. Emily had thought it would be fast — would be helpless, would be rushed, the way the rest of the night had been keyed up — but the bodies had taken over and the bodies had decided to take their time, and the slow grind had built into something Emily had not, in her sexual life, named yet. They had matched breathing. They had matched the rhythm. JJ's hand had gone up into Emily's hair and her other hand had gone hard against the small of Emily's back, holding her down, holding her in, and Emily had been able to feel JJ's pulse in her own clit through the friction and the piercing and the wet, and she had thought — distantly, the thought arriving from far away the way thoughts do when the body has taken everything else — this is the thing they mean by being inside another person.

JJ had said, low, against her temple, "Don't come yet."

"I can't —"

"Don't."

"Jay."

"Don't. Wait for me. Wait —"

Emily had waited. Emily had held herself one inch back from her own edge for she did not know how long after that, JJ rocking up into her with the small precise quarter-thrusts that had been doing the work of a woman moving herself toward a thing she had been refusing for years, and Emily had braced on her forearms and kept the rhythm and not come, not come, JJ's pulse in her own body, JJ's mouth against the side of her neck, JJ's hand fisted in her hair —

And then she had thought: I need to touch her hair.

The thought had arrived not as decision. As need. She had been holding the rhythm and matching JJ's breath and somewhere in the holding she had registered that JJ's ponytail had come almost fully out and was spread across the pillow in a half-undone ruin, and the registering had been followed instantly by the need. She had taken one of her hands off the pillow and gathered the loose mess of JJ's hair into her fist.

Not pulled. Not yet. Just taken hold. The elastic and the loose strands together. The weight of JJ's hair in her hand.

JJ had gone still under her. The small precise quarter-thrusts had stopped. JJ's hand at the small of Emily's back had gripped harder. JJ had said, against Emily's neck, very small, oh.

Emily had pulled.

Not hard. The first pull had been the establishing pull, the I have you pull, the announcement.

JJ had made a sound Emily had not, at first, recognized as a JJ sound. The sound had come from somewhere in JJ that JJ had not, until that moment, shown Emily existed. It had been low, almost a growl, and the body it had come out of had bucked, the whole length of her, hips coming up off the bed and chest coming up off the bed and both her hands going hard against Emily — and Emily had pulled again, harder this time, dragging the fist of JJ's hair down into the mattress, and JJ had given. The whole performance of the night — the eyes at the rail, the practiced angles, the confidence — had gone out of JJ's body in one long second and what had been left under it was a woman with her hair in another woman's fist and her body finally, finally not holding anything in.

JJ had said, slurred, against Emily's neck, "Em — Em — go, fuck, go —"

Emily had not slowed. She had pulled the ponytail down into the mattress and kept her hips moving — faster now, because JJ had finally let her, harder, the piercing exactly where it had to be — and JJ had started to come.

It had not been like the others. The first ones had been JJ in charge of her own undoing. This one was Emily undoing her. JJ had come with her mouth open and her throat working and no sound coming out of her at first, just the whole length of her body convulsing under Emily — hips bucking up against Emily's on every wave, the piercing pressed against Emily's clit through every one — and then somewhere in the middle of the come the sound had arrived and the sound had been Emily's name. Em, Em, oh god, Em. JJ saying it with her hair in Emily's fist and her body coming under Emily's body and her eyes finally fully open looking up at Emily for the first time all night, and the orgasm had gone on past where the others had stopped, longer, JJ shaking through it, JJ's hands hard on Emily's back, JJ's voice gone raw — and Emily had held her by the hair and ground her hips down into the piercing through every wave and watched JJ come apart, and Emily had known, in some deep cold competent part of her, that she would never be able to see JJ again without seeing this.

JJ had come down slowly.

Emily had not, herself, come yet. She had stayed close, hovering, while JJ went, because something in her had decided that JJ was first and JJ was the point. As JJ had come down she had eased the rhythm and started to think about pulling out of the friction —

JJ had said, "No."

"Jay, you just —"

"You didn't."

"I'm okay."

"You didn't."

JJ had unwound her leg from around Emily's hip and gotten her hand down between them and put two fingers on Emily exactly where they had needed to be, and Emily had — Emily had not been ready. She had thought she had more time. She had been doing the math of the night and the math had not included JJ touching her on purpose with intent. JJ had stroked her exactly twice and Emily had come against JJ's hand with her face in JJ's neck and her own hand still fisted in JJ's hair, and JJ had held her through it without saying anything, and the only sound in the apartment when Emily had come down had been Emily's own breathing and the small thrum of JJ's pulse against Emily's cheek.

They had not moved for a while.

Emily had stayed where she was. JJ had stayed where she was. Emily's hand had still been in JJ's hair. JJ's hand had still been between them, fingers slack now, resting. Emily's mouth had been against the side of JJ's throat. The lamp had still been on. The room had still smelled like sex and JJ's shampoo.

After a long time Emily had — gently, the way you replace a thing you had taken — released JJ's hair. She had laid the long loose blonde of it down across the pillow with her palm. She had smoothed it once. She had not, in the moment, known why she did that, but later, lying in the New Orleans hotel three months on, she would understand. She had been putting JJ back. Putting the costume back where she had taken it from.

She had rolled to JJ's side. She had not gone far. She had stayed pressed all along JJ's length, one arm across JJ's stomach, her mouth still at the corner of JJ's jaw. JJ had let her. JJ had not, herself, moved.

The room had been very quiet.

Emily had felt JJ's body go still in a new way. Not relaxed-still. Considering-still. The kind of still a person goes when they are about to say something. Emily had — without knowing she was doing it — held her breath.

JJ had stared at the ceiling.

She had stared at it for a long time. Emily had watched her in profile, watched JJ's eyes move very slightly the way eyes move when they are tracking the shapes of a thought, watched JJ's mouth open very slightly and close again. The room had been silent enough that Emily could hear the refrigerator in the next room cycle on. She could hear a car door on the street. She could hear JJ's breathing, which had gone slow and careful, and JJ's heart through where Emily's arm lay across her chest, which had gone steady but a little too fast.

Emily had waited.

She had known — the way she had known on the stoop, the way she had known at the rail, the way she had known on the drive home — that JJ was about to say a thing. She had known it the way she had known all the other things, with the part of her that read people for a living, and she had wanted, in some part of her not yet fully assembled, to hear it.

She had said, very soft, "What?"

JJ had turned her head on the pillow. She had looked at Emily.

For one half-second JJ's face had been open. The thing that had been under all the masks of the night had been available — not the bar JJ, not the rail JJ, not the practiced JJ, not even the JJ who had come apart under Emily's hand in her hair. The JJ underneath all of those. The one Emily had not yet met. JJ at the door under all the doors. The truth had been right there in JJ's face for that half-second, and Emily had seen it, and her own breath had stopped because she had known what she was about to be told.

JJ had blinked once.

The face had reassembled. Emily had watched it happen the way you watch a kaleidoscope click into a new pattern — small, instantaneous, total — and what had come up in JJ's face had been the bar smile, the small slight upward turn at the corner of the mouth, the line face, the I am about to deliver a sentence I have decided to deliver face. Emily had felt the loss of the other face like a draft.

JJ had said, "Did you lock your car?"

Emily had laughed. The laugh had come out of her involuntarily, the way the what had — the laugh of a woman receiving the polite question because the polite question had been all that was on offer. She had felt the laugh as it left her and known what she was doing. She was accepting the dodge. She was telling JJ yes, fine, we'll do it this way. She was choosing — choosing, with full agency, with full understanding, three months from a hotel bed in New Orleans — to let JJ close the door JJ had cracked open for a half-second.

JJ had said, easy now, easy the way only JJ could be easy, "Georgetown at night is not to be fucked with."

Emily had said, "I got it, Jay."

JJ had closed her eyes.

The lamp had stayed on. Neither of them had moved to turn it off. Emily had kept her arm across JJ's stomach. JJ had not, the rest of the night, said anything about the car or anything else. Emily had stayed until just before dawn and then gotten up and dressed in the dim and put a finger to JJ's lips when JJ had stirred, and JJ had let her go, and Emily had walked out of the apartment and down the twelve interior stairs and through the foyer and down the four steps of the stoop and to her car and driven home and gotten in her own bed and looked at her own ceiling and not said the thing she had not said in JJ's bed, which had been: who has been holding you down by the hair before me, and why did they stop.

The HVAC came back on.

Emily, three months and a thousand miles south, opened her eyes.

The hotel ceiling was textured plaster. She had been staring at it without registering it. Her right hand had migrated from the pillow to her own throat. She moved it. She put it back on her sternum where it belonged.

The clock on the nightstand said 3:42. She had not, until now, looked at it again.

She lay still. She thought about the math. She had had JJ on her tongue and her hands and her hips for two months and three weeks after that bed in Georgetown, and JJ had come to her room at the ends of every case, and they had not, in any of those nights, talked about the car. They had talked about other things. They had talked about books and parents and the small dailinesses of work and the cases when the cases needed talking about, and JJ had stayed past sunrise a few times, and once Emily had made her breakfast, and once they had gone to a movie afterward like the thing they were not. But they had not talked about the car. The car had been the rule. Did you lock your car had become, between them, the shape of the not-saying — a thing JJ would say in the morning, light, careless, the way you say did you brush your teeth, and Emily would say I got it, Jay, and JJ would smile, and they would not, that day or any other, look at the door JJ had cracked open for half a second three months ago and shut.

Emily had thought, in some part of her, that the rule was temporary. That the cracked door was a door that JJ would eventually open all the way, given time, given patience, given the right night. Emily had been waiting. Emily had been treating two and a half months of sex as a waiting room. She had not, until tonight, in the hotel bed in New Orleans, understood that JJ had been waiting for nothing. That JJ had not been keeping the door closed until. JJ had been keeping the door closed because. Because was the whole sentence. There was no second half.

JJ had given Will the card and the line and the look, and JJ had been keeping the door closed. The door had not been a door waiting to open. The door had been the thing JJ had built between herself and Emily, and Emily had spent three months inside the room JJ had built around herself and called it intimacy.

She turned over. She pressed her face into the pillow. She did not cry, because crying was not — was not the shape of this — but she made a small sound into the pillow that was the shape of crying, and her shoulders moved once, and the moving had hurt the muscle between her ribs and the muscle had gripped, and she had lain very still until the grip released.

The clock said 3:51.

She tried, briefly, the practical instructions she had been giving herself across the night. Sleep. You fly in five hours. You will need to be functional. Sleep. The instructions did nothing. Her body had given up on sleeping somewhere around midnight and was now just doing the work of being awake, which it could do, which it was trained to do. She had been awake for longer. She would, after they wheels-upped in the morning, sleep in her own bed in DC for fourteen hours. That was the plan. That was the achievable thing. She would survive the morning. She would survive the morning by being Emily Prentiss who had not slept, and Emily Prentiss who had not slept was a thing other people had to encounter at work, not a thing Emily Prentiss had to do anything special to manage.

She closed her eyes. The card-loop started up again — despite what you may have heard, cell phones can be very good for your health — and Emily, with the part of her brain that had been a profiler before it had been any other thing, watched the line play out and clocked the rhythm of it and thought, very clearly: JJ rehearsed that. JJ had walked across the precinct floor with the line in her mouth. JJ had decided, in the walk, exactly how to angle her chin and where to put the pause and how to tip her body — the way JJ had been tipping her body at the bar three months ago, the practiced angle, the repertoire — and the rehearsal had been the tell, and the tell had been the same tell as the bar.

She's practiced. She's done this? How many times has she? How many more times will she.

Three months ago in a Dupont Circle bar Emily had thought it about strangers. Tonight in a New Orleans hotel Emily was thinking it about a detective from the NOPD whose pocket held JJ's business card, and the same thought was running, and the same Emily was running it, and the only thing that had changed was who JJ was performing for. Not who JJ was performing as.

Emily — Emily who had a master's degree from Yale and clearance high enough to read other people's confessions for breakfast, Emily who had been called a profiler since before she was thirty, Emily who had read JJ's face on the stoop and the rail and the bedroom and known — got, finally, in her hotel bed at 3:53 in the morning the night before her team was due to fly home, the part of the picture she had been failing to assemble for ninety-one days.

She got it for half a second.

Then she lost it.

She lost it because losing it was the only way to survive the next four hours, and she had to survive the next four hours, because there was a plane in the morning and a flight back to DC and an empty apartment at the other end of the flight, and Emily — Emily, three months in the practice of not looking — pivoted. She did the JJ thing. She had learned it from the master. She put her hand back on her sternum and she stared at the ceiling and she rebuilt the wall she had been building all summer, brick by brick, and she told herself: you don't know. you don't know what JJ is. you do not have enough information to know what JJ is. JJ is a person and you are not entitled to her.

It was very nearly convincing.

She breathed out. She breathed in. The wall held. She let the wall hold. The card-loop slowed and faded and what was left was the hotel room and the HVAC and the seventeen-second count between the click and the drop of the ice, and Emily lay in the bed and held very still and did not, for some number of minutes, think anything at all.

Three soft knocks.

Emily did not, at first, hear them.

They were not loud. They were the knock of a woman who has not decided, until the last second, that she is going to knock — a knock made of restraint, three small landings of knuckle against the hollow-core door — and Emily registered them on the second one. By the third she was already sitting up.

She knew the knock.

It was not, she thought distantly, the knock of housekeeping or hotel staff. It was not the knock of Hotch or Morgan or Reid. It was not even the knock of a JJ who had decided to knock with confidence. It was the knock of a JJ who had walked down the hall to Emily's door at four in the morning and stood outside it for some unknown number of seconds and finally, finally, made the small motion of the knuckles that meant open it.

Emily was up off the bed. Her boots were where she had left them. She did not put them on. Her belt was on the dresser. She did not put it on. She had on the collared shirt and slacks she had worked the precinct in and her hair was loose and she crossed the room in maybe four strides, the carpet rough under her bare feet, the door reaching her before she had finished deciding to open it — her hand came up and her palm landed flat on the wood for one half-second, listening, the way you listen for whether the thing on the other side of a door is still there before you let it in.

On the other side there was no sound.

Emily had put her hand on the deadbolt — and a fourth knock had landed under her palm, soft, smaller than the others, more breath than knock, the give-up knock of a woman who had not believed she would still be there to deliver one — and the fourth knock had been the —

— hush of her own breathing JJ had been listening to for the past forty-five seconds, palm flat against the door now and the knuckles of her other hand just lifting away from the wood, head tipped down, eyes closed.

She had counted to thirty-two. She had been about to turn around. That was the truth. That was the thing she would only later be able to say to herself: that she had given Emily until thirty and then asked herself for two more, and then her hand had come up off the wall on its own and made one more knock — smaller, softer, more breath than knock — because the body had decided before the mind had, and now the body was leaving the wood and the body was about to step back from the door and find a way to walk back down the hall.

The deadbolt turned.

She had told herself, on the walk from her room to Emily's, that if Emily did not open the door inside a minute she would leave. She had told herself, halfway down the hall, that she would walk right past Emily's door and into the stairwell at the end and around the building once and come back upstairs and go to bed and let the night end the way she had been letting nights end for three months. She had told herself, three doors out from her own, that she would knock once and turn around. She had told herself, in front of Emily's door, that she would knock twice and turn around.

She had knocked three times.

She had knocked three times because Emily knew her knock — JJ knew that Emily knew her knock, the way she knew Emily had registered her in some part of her body for three months the way JJ had registered Emily — and the third knock had been a kind of insurance. A third knock meant yes, it's me, I'm here, I came. A third knock meant don't pretend it's room service. A third knock meant I am the woman whose card-pass you watched tonight, three months out from my bedroom door in Georgetown, and I have come three doors down the hall at four in the morning because I cannot get on a plane in three hours without saying the thing.

And then she had knocked a fourth time because the third had not been answered, and the fourth had not been insurance, and the fourth had been the small involuntary knock of a body already retreating, and JJ had felt it leave her hand and had been ashamed of it and had been about to turn —

The door opened.

JJ did not, at first, look up. She had her head tipped down and her eyes closed and her palm flat on the wall and the second the door pulled inward she could feel the air of the room come out, hotel-cold, the air JJ had been carrying in her own room for two days a copy of, and she breathed it in and made herself, slowly, raise her head.

Emily was in the doorway.

Emily had on the collared shirt and slacks she had worked the precinct in, the top button of the shirt undone, the cuffs unbuttoned and pushed up her forearms. Emily's feet were bare. Emily's hair was loose and Emily's eyes were red, not crying-red, but the red of a woman who had not slept and who had been doing the math at the ceiling for some number of hours. Emily was holding the door open with one hand and the other was pressed flat against the door frame at shoulder height, and Emily was looking at JJ and not speaking, and JJ — JJ had had a sentence ready in the hallway, a whole opening sentence, and she had lost it the moment Emily's face had come into the light.

"Hi," JJ said.

Emily said nothing.

"Can I —"

Emily stepped back.

JJ went in.

Emily closed the door behind her. JJ heard the latch. She did not turn around. She stood in the middle of the small hotel room with her hands at her sides and her hair down and her own face she could feel doing something she could not control, and she looked at the bed — the bed Emily had been in, the bed Emily had not, by the look of it, slept in, the cover still half-pulled-up the way Emily had pulled it before she got in dressed — and she felt the dimensions of the room close around her like a held breath.

"I tried to want him."

She had not turned around. Her back was to Emily. The bed was the thing in front of her and the door was the thing behind her and the sentence had come out of her mouth without negotiation, and once it was out it was out, and JJ — JJ who had been the woman who could not say the thing for three months — felt her own voice carry the words like a thing carried out of a burning house.

"Somewhere in my head I had myself convinced it was easier."

Emily had not moved. JJ could feel her not moving. The hotel room was small enough that JJ could feel everything in it — the small hum of the mini-fridge, the seam of the wall behind the headboard, the half-open door of the bathroom — and Emily not moving was the loudest of all of them.

"But then I actually tried, and I realized —" JJ closed her eyes. Opened them. The seam in the wallpaper across the room was the thing she was looking at. She would, later, remember the wallpaper. She would remember the seam. "I realized wanting anyone but you is the hardest thing I have ever done."

The room said nothing.

Then Emily — Emily, behind her, very quiet — said, "Jen."

JJ turned around.

Emily was still by the door. Emily had her hand still on the frame. Emily's face was — Emily's face was open, in the way JJ had not seen Emily's face since the bedroom in Georgetown, since the what?, since the half-second before JJ had blinked and put the mask back on. Emily was looking at JJ across the small lit room with the whole of her face available, and JJ — JJ who had asked, with her body, three months ago and then taken it back, JJ who had practiced the line about cell phones in front of a precinct bathroom mirror, JJ who had spent three days telling herself she could be a woman who chose a man in a New Orleans bar — JJ saw Emily's face and understood, finally, the full shape of what she had done.

She crossed the room.

She did not run. She did not, this time, grab Emily's collar. She walked the four steps between them at a deliberate pace and put her hands on either side of Emily's face — not pulling, just holding, the way you hold a thing you want to look at — and she said, "I should have come to you on the first night."

Emily said, "Which one."

JJ closed her eyes. The first night of this case, the first night three months ago, the first night Reid had been back among them, the first night JJ had stood at a bar with her hair up and known something was already coming undone. Which one. Emily had given her the question that meant all of them. JJ took a breath and let it out and said, "All of them."

Emily said, "Okay."

"Em —"

"Come here."

JJ came there.

She kissed Emily slowly. The slowness was the point. Three months of kisses had been on JJ's terms, in JJ's rhythm, performed at JJ's tempo — even the bedroom kiss, even the don't stop, even the more, all of them on the JJ-metronome — and JJ wanted, with the part of her body that had been waiting to be honest for three months, to give Emily a kiss that had no metronome in it at all. She kissed Emily the way you kiss a woman you are about to make love to for the last time. Or for the first time. She didn't know which. Slowly. With her whole mouth. With her hand against Emily's cheek and her thumb at the corner of Emily's jaw and the kiss moving at the pace of a kiss that had nowhere it had to be.

Emily's hands came up to JJ's waist. Not into her hair. Not at her collar. Her waist, the way Emily had touched her at the booth — the protective hand, the I have you hand — and JJ felt the placement of Emily's hands and understood that Emily had registered the hair-down, the loose blonde of it, the absence of the elastic. Emily was not going to reach for the ponytail because the ponytail was not there. Emily — Emily, who had seen JJ at the rail before she had seen her in any other way — knew what the absence of the ponytail meant, and was answering it with her hands at JJ's waist.

JJ broke the kiss. Not far. Just enough to be able to speak.

"I want to do this differently."

"I want — I want you to let me."

"On top. I want — Em, look at me."

Emily, who had been about to lean forward into another kiss, leaned back instead. Her eyes met JJ's. JJ saw Emily understand. The first time JJ had been the one on her back asking to be handled. JJ had spent three months on her back across maybe forty nights asking with her body to be handled. JJ wanted, now, to do the handling. To prove that JJ-on-top was not a thing she could not do. To prove that what they had been was not only the thing JJ had wanted because JJ could not be the other thing. To prove, the way Emily had wanted JJ to prove for months without ever having been told she was wanting it, that JJ could give as well as receive.

JJ said, "Bed."

They walked to the bed. JJ undressed Emily standing up at the edge of the mattress, slowly, button by button on Emily's collared shirt, the way Emily had undressed her three months ago, six buttons taken one at a time at JJ's tempo. JJ slid the shirt off Emily's shoulders. JJ kissed Emily's collarbone. JJ unhooked Emily's bra and put her mouth at the soft of Emily's shoulder where the strap had been and let the bra fall to the carpet. Emily's hands had stayed at JJ's waist the whole time, light, patient. JJ got Emily's slacks open and pushed them down and Emily stepped out of them. JJ pushed Emily's underwear down. Emily stepped out of those too.

JJ undressed herself.

She did it standing in front of Emily with the lamp by the bed on and the curtains drawn against the parking lot light, and Emily did not look away. She lifted her sweatshirt over her head. She unhooked her own bra and let it fall. She pushed her sleep-pants and underwear down together — she had come to Emily's room in what she had been sleeping in, or trying to sleep in, the small soft pants and the loose t-shirt of three sleepless nights — and stood naked in front of Emily and did not perform any of it. Did not tilt her chin. Did not angle. Did not give Emily anything to look at in the bar-sense. Just stood there, the body she had, the body Emily had had her hands on across two months and three weeks, the body Emily had drawn into a mattress by the hair.

Emily breathed out.

JJ said, "Lie down."

Emily lay down.

JJ climbed onto the bed with her. The bed was a queen, hotel-firm, the sheets cool. JJ straddled Emily slowly — knee at one side, knee at the other, sitting back on Emily's thighs — and looked down at her. Emily had her hands at her own sides, palms up, the way a person lies when they are letting another person decide. The hotel lamp was on the lowest setting and the light in the room was the color of a candle, and Emily underneath JJ had her hair fanned across the pillow and her eyes very dark and her mouth slightly open, and JJ — JJ who had been doing the math of the night for three nights, JJ who had thought she was incapable of being on top with intent — felt the weight of Emily under her hips and thought: I have wanted this every night for three months and not let myself know.

She bent down.

She kissed Emily the way she had kissed her at the door, slow, with her whole mouth, but now lying along the length of Emily's body. She did not put her hands on Emily's hair. She did not — did not — let Emily put her hands in JJ's hair, either; when Emily, half-blind with the kiss, brought one hand up off the sheets to JJ's loose blonde, JJ caught the wrist gently and pressed it back to the pillow. Held it there a second. Emily understood. Emily's hand stayed where JJ had put it.

JJ said, against Emily's mouth, "Not tonight."

"No?"

"Not tonight."

JJ kissed her again. Then she moved down.

She moved down Emily's body the way Emily had moved down hers — slow, an inch at a time, the small wet sounds of her mouth on Emily's skin the only sounds in the room. She paused at the soft beneath Emily's breasts. She let her mouth rest there, just below where Emily's pulse moved against her own skin, until Emily's breathing changed under her. JJ knew Emily's breathing. She had been catching Emily's breathing in the dark for three months without telling Emily she was catching it, and now she used everything she had learned without telling Emily — slowed her own mouth to Emily's pace, then slowed it further, made Emily wait — and Emily made a small sound that said more, and JJ did not give her more, not yet.

She moved down to the curve of Emily's stomach. The skin there was warm. The lamp by the bed was low enough that JJ had to feel her way as much as see, and the feeling-her-way was the point — JJ had spent three months learning this body in the dark, three months mapping the small private things Emily did not know JJ had cataloged, and tonight she was using the map openly, with the lamp on, with Emily watching. She put her mouth at the inside of Emily's hipbone. There was a small scar there. Emily had never told her about it. JJ had found it the second night they had been in bed together and never asked. She had kissed it the second night and never told Emily she had kissed it, and tonight she set her mouth on the scar and kissed it again, slow, with intent, and Emily said, low, Jay.

JJ did not look up. She moved her mouth the last six inches in a slow straight line and put her tongue flat at the place Emily had been wanting it for some unknown number of minutes, and Emily — Emily made the sound she made, the one JJ knew, the one JJ had been hearing in her head for three days while she had been pretending to want a detective in a New Orleans bar — and JJ heard it and the hearing did something to her chest that the rest of the night had been doing nothing to.

She took her time. Three months of nights, JJ had been on the receiving end of Emily's mouth and Emily's hands and Emily's careful attention, and tonight she was giving it back. Every degree of pressure, every angle, every pause she had ever been taught about Emily's body by Emily's body in the dark, she used. She watched Emily's face. She watched Emily's hands at her sides — the way Emily's fingers curled when she was close, the way one of them came up off the sheet to press against her own mouth when JJ slowed — and JJ slowed when Emily's hand came up, made Emily wait, brought Emily back from the edge so she could build it again.

"Look at me."

Emily looked at her. From down between Emily's thighs JJ could only see the angle — Emily's chin, Emily's mouth, the line of her throat — but Emily's eyes found JJ's and stayed, and JJ kept her tongue moving and kept Emily looking, and when Emily finally went over she went with her eyes still open, watching JJ.

It was the first time Emily had come quietly in three months. No chasing. No breath held. No performance of how good it had been. Just a slow opening, like a hand uncurling — the breath leaving her in one long even shape, the small involuntary lift of her hips into JJ's mouth, the way her hands stayed at her sides and her eyes stayed on JJ's eyes, the orgasm moving through her the way water moves through a level vessel.

JJ rode it out with her, mouth on her, and brought her down, and then laid her cheek for a moment on the inside of Emily's thigh and just breathed.

Then she came back up.

She crawled back up the length of Emily's body and stopped halfway, mouth at the soft of Emily's stomach, and she looked up to find Emily already looking down at her. Emily's face was open in a way JJ had only seen it once before — in the bedroom in Georgetown three months ago, on the night Emily had not been able to stop watching her — and JJ registered it and knew what it cost Emily to let her face be that open, and JJ moved up the rest of the way, and Emily reached for her and pulled her up by the shoulders gently the rest of the rest, and JJ let herself be pulled.

She slotted her hip into Emily's the way Emily had slotted hers into JJ's on the night in Georgetown. The piercing came against Emily's body. Emily's breath caught.

JJ stopped there. Hip to hip. Not moving.

She wanted Emily to feel it. She wanted Emily to register it — the discrete metal fact between them, the thing on JJ's body that nobody had touched in three days or three months but Emily, the thing JJ had spent three days deciding she might be willing to give away and had not — and she held her hips still and pressed the piercing into Emily on purpose, deliberate pressure, the here, this is here, this has been here the whole time of it, and Emily made a sound that was not a word.

"He never touched me."

JJ said it against Emily's mouth, kissing her, slow. The kiss tasted of Emily on JJ's mouth and JJ on Emily's mouth, the same self twice removed, and Emily — Emily under her, naked, hair across the pillow, hands at her sides where JJ had put them — said, "I know."

JJ closed her eyes.

She had not expected — had not allowed herself to expect — that. I know. Emily had said it without hesitation, the way you say a thing you have always known, and JJ had to take a small breath against the inside of her own throat because the I know had loosened something she had been holding hard for three days.

She pressed the piercing into Emily again. I know. She kissed Emily slowly. I know. Three days of holding herself away from this body had come undone with two words and the simple fact of a small metal bar between them, and JJ did not, herself, make a sound, but Emily felt the shift through the contact and Emily's arms came up off the bed and went around JJ's back, light, holding — not pulling, not pinning, just here — and JJ let herself be held against Emily's body for a moment with her piercing pressed into Emily and her breath against Emily's mouth.

Then she moved.

The grind started without either of them having to find it. They had had this rhythm before, exactly this rhythm, in a bed in Georgetown three months ago with their bodies pressed along each other and the piercing the discrete locatable thing between them — but tonight JJ was the one on top, JJ was the one setting the pace, and the pace JJ set was not the desperate pace of the first night. It was slower than that. Much slower. It was the pace of a woman who had decided to make Emily feel every individual inch.

JJ held herself on her elbows above Emily and kept her hair behind her shoulder with a small adjustment of her head and looked down at her, and Emily looked back, and JJ did not let Emily look away. Not for any second of it. Emily's eyes started to flutter shut once and JJ said, low, look at me, and Emily looked. JJ said it like an instruction and Emily received it like one, and the receiving was part of it.

JJ rocked her hips. Slow, exploratory. The piercing dragged across Emily's body and the drag pulled a small involuntary sound out of Emily, and JJ registered the sound and gave Emily another small rock to match it. Emily — without coordinating, without anyone telling her to — lifted her hips up to meet JJ's, looking for the friction back, and JJ pulled her own hips back a quarter inch and did not give. Emily said, Jay — and JJ said, very quiet:

"No. Wait."

"Jay."

"I want you to wait for me."

Emily stopped lifting. The hand at her side came up and curled into a fist at the pillow next to her own face, and Emily said, low, okay, and JJ gave her the next rock and moved against Emily the way she had been wanting to move against another body for three months without admitting it — slow, full, deliberate, every push the length of JJ's whole hip, the piercing between them.

She said, against Emily's mouth, stay there. And don't move. And I'll come to you. And Emily — who had been the one who had taken JJ on the first night, who had walked JJ backward and pulled her by the hair into a mattress — laid still under JJ and let JJ come to her, and let JJ set the pace, and let JJ press the piercing into her body on every push without trying to chase the friction.

The slowness became unbearable. Not in the sense of wanting it to be over. In the sense of being so close to something neither of them could yet name that even breathing differently would have broken it. JJ felt Emily's pulse against her own clit through the piercing. She felt her own pulse against Emily's clit on the return. The bodies were doing what JJ had been refusing for three months — meeting each other, slow, without performance — and JJ felt the meeting in her chest before she felt it anywhere else.

She said, low, against Emily's temple, don't come yet.

"Jay —"

"Wait. I want — Em, wait. With me."

Emily waited. She held herself one breath short of her own edge — JJ felt it gather under her, the small involuntary shake at Emily's thigh, the way Emily's hand on her own pillow had gone hard — and she waited, the way JJ had asked her to wait, and JJ was undone by the waiting. By Emily letting her be the one to time it. By Emily trusting her to know when. JJ, who had not let herself be trusted with anything except her body for three months, felt her own edge come up under her at the wrong pace, faster than she had wanted, and she dropped her forehead to Emily's forehead and kept the rhythm exactly where she wanted it and said, into the small space between their mouths:

"Now. With me. Now."

Emily came the second JJ said now. JJ felt it under her — Emily's hips lifting up into hers, the specific small shake at Emily's thighs, Emily's mouth opening against JJ's mouth — and JJ went over with her, exactly with her, the rhythm staying where she had set it through the first wave and the second and the third, JJ rocking the piercing into Emily through every one and Emily rocking back, both of them with their eyes open against each other's open eyes the whole time. Emily made a small sound that was not a name and not a word and not a performance — just the body, just Emily — and JJ answered it with a small sound of her own that had not, until tonight, been in her vocabulary, and the two of them rocked through the come together until the waves stopped on the same beat.

JJ stayed where she was.

She did not pull off. She did not roll off. She did not move at all. She kept her hips slotted into Emily's and her forearms braced on either side of Emily's head and her forehead against Emily's forehead, and she breathed there, and Emily breathed back, and for a long stretch the only thing in the room was the slow exchange of one breath for another. The hotel HVAC clicked off and the room went quiet enough that JJ could hear Emily's heart through where her own chest pressed Emily's chest. Emily's hands had moved at some point — without JJ feeling them move — and were now at JJ's back, one between her shoulder blades and one at the small of her back, holding her there. Holding her here.

JJ did not, herself, move.

She was learning what had just happened. The body knew before the mind. The body had been keyed up and emptied at the same time and was now, in the long still after, cataloguing — Emily's pulse in her ribs, Emily's breath at her temple, the warm exhale of Emily moving through her hair, the place where JJ's piercing still sat against Emily's body, the small ongoing aftershocks neither of them was naming.

Somewhere in the long quiet JJ understood that the I know had been doing more than she had thought. Emily had known. Emily had known about Will. Emily had also, possibly, somewhere in the third sleepless night, known the other things — the rail, the practiced angles, the three months of waiting — but Emily had not, at the door, asked her to account for any of it. Emily had stepped back and let JJ in.

She lowered herself, finally, the rest of the way down. She laid her full weight on Emily and let Emily take it, and Emily took it — Emily's arms came up around JJ's back fully and Emily held her, and JJ pressed her face into Emily's neck and let the breath go out of her in a long shape that was not a sob and not a sentence — and they lay like that for a while, JJ's hair across Emily's shoulder, Emily's hand flat against the small of JJ's back, the lamp still on by the bed.

Eventually JJ rolled to Emily's side. She did not go far. She stayed pressed all along Emily's length, one leg across Emily's thighs, her face still tucked against Emily's neck. Emily's arm came around her. Emily's other hand came up and, very gently, with the lightness of a person handling a thing that had been refused once and was being offered now without being asked for, smoothed JJ's loose blonde hair back from her temple. Once. Twice. Then she let her hand rest against JJ's head, palm flat, fingers spread in the hair, the way you rest a hand on a thing you have loved enough to put down carefully.

JJ said, against Emily's neck, very small, "I think — I think I love you. In — in love with you."

Emily said, "I know, Jen. I love you too."

JJ closed her eyes.

She did not sleep yet. She did not dream. She did not make promises or decisions.

All she knew was the rest will live in the morning. In the daylight.