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She never thought she’d be someone who actually enjoyed working out.
She’d always done it. Keeping fit was a key part of the career she’d chosen. It allowed her to keep herself and her colleagues safe, allowed her to chase down suspects and make it to the sides of victims without feeling a burning in her lungs or her legs. It was something she did because she had to, but because she wanted to.
That all changed after Ian had almost killed her. After he had killed her, for all intents and purposes. At first, it frustrated her how quickly the simplest of exercises would tire her out, how the walk down the hallway in the hospital would make her breathless. As time went on, as she recovered and got stronger, she marvelled at what she could do, at what her body could do. It felt like nothing short of a miracle that she’d been torn apart and sewn back together and that she’d come back from it, that she was stronger than she had ever been, and suddenly she found herself looking forward to exercising, to some time that was just for her.
In Paris, working out had been her salvation. She found more in that than she ever had in a church, her sanctuary in a gym membership she had under a false name, one that allowed her to go to any number of gyms across the city so her habits couldn’t be tracked. It had stuck with her when she’d come home, something she didn’t want to give up now that she enjoyed it, and it centred her on the bad days. Gave her something to focus on other than how different her life looked from how it had since Ian had torn through it and her.
Making that choice, and sticking to it, had also, unexpectedly, given her Aaron, too.
On some level, Emily knew they likely would have ended up where they were now anyway, but maybe not as quickly. He told her he was going to train for the triathlon and didn’t know where to start, and without thinking, she offered to train with him for the running, drawing the line at swimming and cycling. It sparked something between them, something she thought she’d lost when Ian died. The few dates they’d gone on before, the few nights they’d spent together, were a distant memory that might as well have happened to someone else.
Sometimes, she thinks they might have done.
They’d made their way back to each other. It had been months now, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever been so happy, if she had ever been this happy. She loved him, and he loved her, and everything else they were figuring out along the way.
She’s thinking about him, and their date that night as she finishes up her workout in the gym in Quantico, her muscles aching pleasantly as she throws her towel into her bag and heads for the bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror as she washes her hands, grimacing when she realises she likely won’t get out of washing her hair when she gets home, and she’s about to head back out through the gym when she hears a familiar voice.
“Did you see Prentiss?”
She rolls her eyes at the sound of Agent Moore’s voice. He was on the counterterrorism team and thought he was God's gift to women. There had been many a night or FBI fundraiser when she’d had to, politely but firmly, let him know she wasn’t interested. She’d noticed him in the gym with another agent from his team, Agent Thompson, and she’d done her best to avoid them both, trying to pretend that she hadn’t noticed them staring at her on and off throughout her session.
“Yeah,” Agent Thompson replies, sucking in a breath through his teeth, “Such a shame.”
Agent Moore chuckles, “Doyle did a real number on her,” he replies, “Remember when she used to be the hottest one here?”
She feels her cheeks go warm, embarrassment burning her from the inside out as she looks down at her abdomen, the starburst of scar tissue from where Ian had impaled her on display, peeking out from beneath the band of her sports bra. She hadn’t even thought about it, hadn’t considered throwing on a shirt for her workout, and all of a sudden, it’s clear why they’d been staring at her at all.
“I mean, she’s still got the face,” Thompson says, “It’s a shame about the body.”
“I wonder if Hotchner makes her wear a shirt,” Moore says, and she can picture the smirk painted across his face, can hear it in his voice as she stands frozen just on the otherside of the wall.
Thompson chuckles, “You saw him in the changing room without his shirt that one time, remember? He’s not exactly got much going for himself either.” He says, and it almost makes her step out into the gym to confront them, to tell them that they aren’t even half of what he is, but she knows he wouldn’t thank her for it, that in her attempt to defend him, she might embarrass him instead. “Maybe they’re well-suited for each other. Damaged goods and all that.”
Moore laughs, “You’re right, I wondered what she saw in him, but maybe he’s the only one who can look at that and not feel sick.”
She feels something crack inside of her. The confidence she’d quietly built brick by brick until she no longer thought about her scars starts to crumble, letting the self-doubt and hatred she’d dammed behind it start to spill through. Her scar itches and burns in a way it hasn’t in months, and she feels rooted to the spot, unable to move until they’ve gone, not wanting them to see that she’d heard them, let alone let them know they’d upset her.
She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
Eventually, when they move on to the topic of other women in the office and head for the showers, she grabs an old t-shirt she forgot she had at the back of her locker and pulls it on before she leaves, desperate to be anywhere but the place that until today had brought her nothing but peace.
___
She tries to get over it.
She gets home, has a shower, gets ready for her date with Aaron while looking at herself in the mirror as little as possible, and she does her best to pretend she’s okay.
Aaron, of course, notices something is wrong almost immediately. He notices the tension in her shoulders as he wraps his arms around them. He sees how she flinches when he leans in to kiss her, her smile tight and a little too reminiscent of the time she was fighting an enemy he didn’t know existed.
He waits until they are back from dinner to ask. He knows her well enough to understand that she needs to sort through whatever has happened since he saw her in the office a few hours ago by herself first. He’d never begrudge her that, because he knew he was the same way too, that he needed to work things through on his own before he took it to anyone else. It’s one of the reasons they worked so well, one of the reasons he could see forever with her.
When they get back to her place after dinner, he pours them a glass of wine each as he encourages her to sit on the couch, and she smiles at him, looking as relaxed as she has all evening, as he looks comfortable in her kitchen, as if he belonged wherever she was.
“You okay, sweetheart?” He asks, and she smiles, nodding as she takes the glass of wine he offers her before he joins her on the couch.
“Yeah,” she replies, “I was just thinking how good you look in my kitchen.”
He chuckles and leans in to kiss her, only pulling back just enough to speak, “Well, I’m sure I’ll look even better when I’m making you breakfast in the morning.”
He’s stayed over countless times, and she’s stayed at his place just as often, but the implication makes her smile slip from her face, and her scar burns. The words Thompson and Moore had exchanged about her rolling back and forth in her brain as she tries and fails to ignore them. They’d pulled on the thread of an anxiety she thought she’d tied up neatly, something she thought she’d got over, but all of a sudden it feels like it’s unravelling. All of the confidence she’d gained in recent months tangled up and abandoned on the floor, liable to trip her whenever she tries to stand.
Aaron falters too, cursing himself internally, and he shakes his head, “Sorry, if you’d rather I went home-”
She shakes her head and reaches out for him, wrapping her hand around his before she lets him spiral even just a little, guilt for letting him doubt himself heavy on top of everything else sitting on her chest.
“I always want you to stay,” she replies, “I just…” she drifts off and shakes her head, “Fuck, I don’t know how to say this without it sounding ridiculous.”
“You’ve never sounded ridiculous,” he says, squeezing her hand, his eyes warm and soft when she looks up to meet them. “Well, apart from when you’re debating with Derek if a hot dog is a sandwich or not.”
“It absolutely is a sandwich, no matter what he says,” she replies, her smile getting wider when his does, and then it fades as she remembers why she’s upset in the first place.
“You can tell me anything,” he assures her, placing his glass of wine down and taking hers too so he can tug her closer, letting her settle against his chest, “You know that.”
She nods, because she does know that, and she sighs, looking straight ahead at a photo of the two of them and Jack that she’d framed and hung on her wall, the only thing in the entire apartment that didn’t look like it was part of a show home.
“When I was working out after work…Thompson and Moore from Counterterrorism were there, and they must have thought I had left because they started talking about me,” she swallows thickly, trying to ignore the embarrassment climbing up her throat for letting the opinion of two men she didn’t like let alone respect upset her so much, “I wore something where you can see my scar,” she explains, and she looks up at him, sees how his jaw gets tight as he puts the pieces together himself, protectiveness pressed into the way he tightens his embrace on her, “The things they said…” she chokes on a dry laugh, “Well, lets just say they weren’t complimentary.” He wants to know the details, but he also doesn’t, sure they’d make him see red and do something he’d later regret. He settles on kissing her temple and pulling back to look at her, tucking some of her hair behind her ear as she looks at him with shining eyes.
“They are idiots,” he says, his voice tight, barely controlled, “Do you want to tell me what they said?”
She thinks about what they said about him, too, and she shakes her head. She knows firsthand how long it took him to be okay with the damage Foyet had left behind on his skin, remembers how much she’d reassured him the first night they’d spent together, months before Ian had hurt her in ways she hadn’t thought she’d be able to recover from.
“No,” she replies, “Not yet,” she adds, scrunching her nose up as she lets her hand fall to her abdomen.” “The worst part is I didn’t even think about it,” she says, looking down at their linked hands, finding a sense of comfort in how well they seemed to fit together. If she were someone who believed in soulmates, someone who didn’t know exactly how hard they’d both fought to make it to each other, she would think that the spaces between her fingers had been made to fit his. “It will be a long time before I do that again.”
He’s half tempted to find a way to get the other men fired right now, but he knows that’s not what she needs or wants. She didn’t want to be protected, but loved, even if she still didn’t know how to want or ask for that.
“You’re beautiful.”
She smiles, a smudge of sadness pressed into her dimple, and she shrugs, “Honey, you’re my boyfriend. You’re supposed to say that.”
“I’ve always thought you were beautiful,” he replies, reaching out to cup her cheek, to press his thumb into her dimple to wipe the sadness away, “Even when I was married to someone else, way back when we first met.”
She raises her eyebrow at him, “You mean when you hated me?”
“I didn’t hate you,” he replies, smiling when she does, grateful that he’s been able to distract her, no matter how briefly, “But you’ve always been beautiful, sweetheart, and you always will be.”
She presses her lips together, and she wonders if it should bother her that he’s made her feel better already, that the tiniest bit of reassurance from him has made her feel lighter than she has since she overheard the awful things their colleagues had said about her. She thinks if it were anyone other than him, it would bother her, but she loved him, and he loved her, and she wished she’d told him straight away, that she’d let herself be comforted by him the moment he arrived instead of trying to deal with it herself.
It was a slow process, learning to let yourself be loved.
“Do you want me to do something about Thompson and Moore?” He asks, his jaw tight with anger she knows he’s trying to control, “I can report them to-”
“No,” she says, cutting him off as she cups his cheek, “I just want to forget about it.”
He shakes his head, “They shouldn’t talk about you like that, about anyone, but especially…”
She kisses him to distract him, but she gets lost in it. She takes her time with it, tastes the wine he’d poured them on his tongue before she pulls back, feeling more confident than she had all evening, emboldened by the way he saw her, instead of being shamed by the way others did.
“Show me?” She asks, her nose nudging against his, smiling when he raises an eyebrow, but leans forward to taste her smile anyway, as addicted to her as she was to him. “I want to think about how you see me, not how they do.”
“You want me to show you how beautiful you are?” He asks, gripping her tighter, his palm burning hot on her hip through the material of her dress. She nods in response, and he grins. He has them both standing before she can really register it, losing her footing for a second before he wraps his arm around her waist, guiding her to the bedroom with his lips pressed against her neck as he whispers praise into her pulse.
He was chatty during sex. It surprised her the first time. He’d muffled words of admiration against her skin, saying more to her in a few minutes than he had the entire first month they’d known each other, and she’d loved it. Every word a brush stroke of colour as he let her know how he saw her, the image coming to life bit by bit as he learned what made her sigh and gasp.
It was no different now that they did know each other, now that they had done this countless times. In some ways, it was more special, more important to her, because she’d always been told she was beautiful, but he made her feel exquisite. Like a work of art that only he got to see.
Her dress is off before they make it to her bedroom, left somewhere in the hallway for one of them to trip over in the morning on the way to make breakfast. He leads her towards the bed and encourages her to sit on the edge of it, looking at her with such reverence that it makes her suck in a breath, her skin tingling with want and anticipation. He leans over her, encouraging her backwards so her elbows are against the comforter, and then he stamps a kiss against her lips.
He presses a kiss against her cheek, her chin, her neck, her collarbone. Each press of his lips against her skin a stamp of love. She sucks in a breath when he kisses the scar on her breast, and she arches her back as his hands trail up it, unclasping her bra and pulling it off, throwing it to another corner of the room before he sits up enough just to look at her.
She tenses the moment he looks at the starburst of scar tissue beneath her ribs. He draws a finger back and forth over it, feeling the peaks and troughs of it, as he settles over her, his face level with the spot where she’d been torn apart and pulled back together. She can barely feel the way he’s touching her. The scar was still numb, and she knew it might always be, as if a part of her had actually died that day, a part of her she’d never get back.
“It’s beautiful, just like the rest of you, and you know why?” He asks, looking up at her, his chin resting low on her stomach. He smiles when she swallows thickly and shakes her head, sucking in a breath as his breath skips across her skin. “Because it’s made of you.”
He kisses the scar before he moves on, trailing his lips and tongue down her body, stopping to kiss the tiny scar just above he belly button, the remaining evidence she’d once had it pierced as a form of rebellion when she was a teenager. He carries on, sighing contentedly as he reaches her underwear, pausing only to hook his fingers into them, smiling when her hips twitch at the warmth of his skin.
She adjusts her weight on her elbows as he kneels in front of her, her throat tight as he smiles at her, his fingers skipping up the inside of her legs, following how her muscles tense as he reaches her inner thighs.
“Aaron.” She moans as he presses his thumb against her, unable to find it in her to be annoyed about the way he smirks when he dips into her to wet his finger before he withdraws to draw circles over her clit, “Fuck.”
He shushes her, one hand on her stomach to keep her still as she hooks her legs over his shoulders, “Relax, sweetheart.”
She chuckles, but her response is lost somewhere in her throat when he licks through her, the scrape of the start of his stubble against her thigh enough to make her mind go blank, everything other than him forgotten. She grasps at the comforter, fistfuls of expensive cotton scrunched up in her palms as she rolls her hips against his face, her heel digging into his shoulder as she hooks him in place, as if there was anywhere he’d rather be than between her thighs.
He builds her up slowly, using his knowledge of her against her as he makes a point of drawing it out. He finally gives in when she whines, a sound she’d deny if he pointed it out, her heel pressing into his shoulder so tightly he’s sure he’ll still feel it in the morning. She moans his name when she tips over the edge, her hips twitching against his face.
She laughs when her senses return to her, as the tingling in her limbs starts to wear off, and she kicks at his shoulder when he kisses her inner thigh, smearing herself against her skin as he chases the shiver he causes. He catches her foot and presses his thumbs into the ball of it, smiling as her breathing returns to normal, and she looks him up and down, seemingly only just realising he was still fully dressed.
“You’re wearing far too many clothes,” she says, shifting up the bed as he stands, tilting her head as she watches him undress, her eyes catching on his scars as they are slowly revealed. He carefully lays his shirt and suit over the arm of the chair she keeps in the corner, and she chuckles, “So your suit gets carefully hung up, and my clothes are in all corners of the room?”
He smiles as he joins her on the bed, looming over her as he settles between her thighs, “Your underwear, as pretty as it is, doesn’t need dry cleaning.”
She beams at him and reaches between them, delighting in briefly having the upper hand as he gasps when she pumps him up and down, his forehead landing against her collarbone as she twists her wrist, “It’s expensive underwear.”
“I’ll buy you more,” he mutters, lifting his head to look at her, catching her lips in a kiss as she guides him into her. They both groan at the familiar stretch, and she throws her head back, exposing her neck to him as she wraps her leg around his hips, “Fuck, Em,” he says, kissing her throat, feeling the pulse of her in every possible way, “You feel so good.”
“You do too,” she replies, rolling her hips against his, grateful when he takes the hint and he starts to move, stealing the breath from her lungs as he thrusts against her, “So good.”
He pulls back to look at her and links their hands together next to her head. He watches as her eyelashes flutter, as she tries to suck in a breath, choking on his name instead, as he reaches between them with his other hand, pressing his thumb against her clit.
“You’re so beautiful, sweetheart,” he says, leaning down to kiss her again, pressing the taste of her against her tongue, making her moan as she wraps an arm around him, holding him impossibly closer.
His praise makes her blood fizz beneath her skin, and she tightens around him, encouraging him to carry on, to shower her in praise, her name mixed in with every descriptor he can think of, each of them lost to the air around them or pressed against her skin like a tattoo. She feels him suck a bruise alongside one of them, a mark she’d wear with pride, one she’d press her finger against in the morning to chase the feeling of him.
It’s the final thing to tip her over the edge, the final assault on her senses that clears her mind entirely of everything other than him and her and the way they loved each other. When she comes, it's quieter this time, a sound that she gasps against his neck as she pulls him over the edge too, her name a prayer on his lips as he comes inside of her.
They lay like that for a few seconds, both of them getting their breath back, before she encourages him up just enough that she can kiss him, her arms hooked around his neck as she holds him in place.
“I love you,” she says, smiling as their eyes meet, “Thank you.”
“You never have to thank me, sweetheart,” he says, kissing the corner of her lips, “I love you too.”
They clean themselves up. He insists she uses the bathroom first, and then kisses her as they cross paths in the doorway of the ensuite. When he comes back into the bedroom, she’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, wearing his shirt, only a few of the buttons done up, and she smiles at him, holding out the two glasses of wine they’d abandoned in the living room, throwing a wink in his direction when he raises an eyebrow at her.
“I’ll pay for your dry cleaning,” she quips as he joins her on the bed, her eyes lingering on the scars on his chest and on his arm. She thinks of what she’d overheard Thompson and Moore say about him, and a flash of anger rolls through her, fury that they’d ever see him as anything other than the work of art he was, “You’re beautiful too,” she says, trailing her finger over his thickest scar, the one right over his heart. The scar that was made of him. She smiles when her eyes meet his, his confusion painted across his face, “You know that, right?”
He shrugs and settles against the headboard, encouraging her to lean against him, “If you say so, sweetheart.”
“I do say so,” she replies, handing him his wine, “Why don’t we just agree that we’re both beautiful and leave it at that?”
He turns his head to kiss her, and he nods, tucking her hair behind her ear, “I think I can agree to that.”