This is in response to the Chit Chat on Authors' Corner January Challenge.
My prompts were Morgan and JJ friendship, New Year's resolutions, time zones,
and the 2011 ball dropping.
Love, From a Distance
"It's the expectations," Derek Morgan said, his tone unexpectedly bitter. "It's the goddamn miserable promises."
It was a loud and raucous party, sixty-some FBI personnel and assorted significant others in the party room of the condo development where one of the assistant directors lived. Long catered tables of every imaginable kind of goodies. A huge flat-screen TV against one wall silently flashed coverage of the upcoming Times Square festivities while a live band ground out a dizzying melange of hits from the last few decades, everything from "Bad Romance" to "As Time Goes By."
Jennifer Jareau, no longer an FBI agent and missing it intensely, had attended the party as the guest of Derek Morgan, who had explained that A, she needed to be there because she was and always would be one of them, and B, anyhow, Will was out of town checking a potential consulting job, and, C, Derek had no bunnies currently on his string with whom he cared to share the welcoming in of the New Year.
An unstated D had been that he seemed unusually quiet and pensive, especially considering his official role as the BAU's chief party animal.
Now, her not-quite-more-or-less date sat by himself in the closest thing the party room had to a corner, nursing a single bottle of Tsing Tao.
"It's all about promises," he repeated to her as a group of financial analysts and records managers line-danced to "Achy Breaky Heart." It wasn't a pretty sight.
He took a sip of his beer and made a face. "Warm," he said.
Before JJ could point out that he had been rolling the bottle between his rangy brown hands for the better part of an hour, he took another pull. "Commitments," he grumbled. "Expectations. Plans for the freaking future."
She plopped herself down beside him.
He took his phone from his belt and stared at it as if daring it to ring. Flicked it to vibrate, then back to ring tone. To vibrate. To ring tone.
"Talk to me," she said, gently nudging his knee.
Another long swallow of room temperature Tsing Tao. "I told her I was gonna have to love her from a distance."
Automatically, she glanced around to see where Garcia was. Resplendent in a floor length pink dress with purple sequins, she was trying without apparent success to lure Reid out to join the line-dancers.
"What's going on, Derek?"
He picked up a small plate of fruits, veggies, cheese, and dip from the floor beside him. "She won't let him go," he said. Misery hovered over his broad brow as he nibbled a carrot stick. "And I can't fix her. I can only fix me. Bunny food?" he added, extending the plate toward JJ.
He'd had the plate longer than the beer. The celery sticks were limp and probably as room temperature as the beer, too. Nevertheless, to buy time, JJ picked out three or four of the less gross-and-abandoned-looking items on the plate and arranged them on a napkin in her lap.
She wanted to protest that she liked Kevin Lynch, that he was sweet and attentive and a calm center for Penelope's pyrotechnic life, but instead she nibbled a strawberry and watched some poor suicidal senior ballistics analyst trying to feel up Erin Strauss.
"I've even gone to a couple, you know, Al-Anon meetings," Morgan continued. "And Reid's been just great, you'd never expect him to be such a rock, but he is. He really is."
Al-Anon? Reid? OK, now, that was confusing.
"Does, does–" Nope. Try again. "Has Garcia developed, ah, a substance abuse problems?"
Genuine surprise on his features. "What? Baby Girl? Oh, no, no." Another sigh, another frustrated look at the faceplate of his phone. Willing it to ring. "No, Garcia's cool."
He glanced quickly around the room, then leaned in closer to JJ. "It's my mama," he confided, his voice barely a whisper. "She has herself this boyfriend, Reuben, and he looks just great on paper, retired high school math teacher and football coach, writes a science blog for the Trib, has a house and a van and a boat, but the dude drinks like a fish, Jayj. And when he's on the sauce he's loud and argumentative and undependable and he's a big, big dude. And he's started drinking at times he's supposed to be sober, and he's pushed Mama around a little already. And she calls me up and she's just this happy little bundle of excuses for him. And it's killing me, JJ. It's just killing me."
He looked up. Grimaced as David Rossi took the stage, accepted a microphone, and started crooning, oh, some random Barry Manilow tune. They all sounded alike to JJ, whose musical taste ran more to metal than to Manilow.
"So I told her," he continued, "I can't stand listening to her anymore about how he yells at her or acts like an asshole in public or just doesn't freakin' show up. I told her that I love her, that I'll always love her, that I'm ready to love Reuben, even, but I'm making a New Year's resolution to love her from a distance – no phone calls, no visits, no listening to any guess-what-Reub's-done-now crap – until she makes a New Year's resolution to attend three Al-Anon meetings. I told her, Ma, you don't have to join the damn thing. I'm not asking for a lifetime commitment. But I want her to hear some stories that might ring a little closer to home than she expects them to."
A roar of excitement erupted from the party guests as the band ground to a halt and the sound cranked up on the TV: Just five minutes were left before the 2011 ball dropped.
"And of course, with her in Chicago, if she does call, it won't be until one o'clock here," he said. "And I gotta tell you, the waiting is driving me crazy. Even though I don't have a whole lot of hope. I mean, in this job, we sure see the power of denial."
His phone sounded.
His eyes widened as he read the faceplate. "I gotta take this outside, JJ," he said hoarsely. "Too noisy in here."
He set aside his warm Tsing Tao and rose to his feet. She could hear him saying, Hey, Mama, into the phone as he walked away.
New Year's Eve. All over the world, parties. Drinking.
JJ wondered whether Derek's mother was at that very moment calling from beside a drunken boyfriend.
She hesitated for only half a minute before she stood up herself. She discarded the napkin full of droopy snacks in a caterer's trash bin and followed Morgan out of the party room.
"Yeah, yeah, I hear you," he was saying.
Her first instinct was to tiptoe, but she didn't want him to feel that she had been sneaking up on him, so she made no effort to soften the click of her heels on the bronze terrazzo flooring.
He glanced up, saw her, and smiled.
"Hang on, gonna put you on speaker," he said."Need my hands free. OK, go on, Mama."
"So I told him, Reub, honey, I can't control your life for you," Mrs. Morgan's voice said. "You have to make your own choices. But I have to control my own life, and I just can't stand by and watch you and that goddamn tequila destroy the man I love. So until you're making a serious attempt to control your drinking, I'm gonna have to love you from a distance."
Eyes glistening, Derek said softly, "So how's it working out for you so far?"
"Well, that's why I called. He went to two meetings last week, and he got to talking to a couple guys at the paper, and – well, I just got back from driving him to a rehab place up in Madison that somebody at a meeting recommended to him. He said it was his New Year's gift to me.
"And I just couldn't wait until my midnight. I had to tell you before it was your midnight. And to thank you for your New Year's gift to me – the courage to tell me to put up or shut up."
JJ stood on her toes and kissed Derek on the cheek, then returned to the party to let him talk to his mother in privacy.
"Seven!" the partygoers chanted as she reentered the room.
"Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One!"
The ball hit bottom and the entire East Coast screamed "Happy New Year!"
Champagne corks popped. A rainbow of streamers dropped from the ceiling; and a rainbow of helium balloons soared up from the floor. Confetti flew and noisemakers hooted as the band thumped out Auld Lang Syne.
She stood there and watched the delirium, the hugs and the smooching both on the screen and around her. Anderson from the second unit and Glenn from records both gave her happy, boozy kisses. Aaron and David and Emily and Spencer and Garcia – the rest of her second family – all squeezed the breath out of her with the enthusiasm of their embraces, the warmth of their kisses.
Her own phone sounded urgently.
Will, calling from the West Coast where it was only just a couple minutes past nine, babbled of his love for her and his commitment to her and Henry and about how much he missed her.
Then the babysitter called to let Henry (who had been awakened by local fireworks) mumble his sleepy toddler App Noo-ee, Mama greetings.
As she rang off, Derek materialized beside her.
"Happy New Year, Jayj," he said, hugging her tightly.
"Everything looking a little better now?"
His grin was answer enough.
Then his eyes narrowed and he frowned. He nudged her attention to where Emily Prentiss was trying to get David Rossi to swing-dance to "Wasn't That a Party!"
"I believe that you and I could do a whole lot better than that," he said, leading her toward the dance floor.
"You're probably right."
Yeah. It was all about the expectations.
~ end ~
Gonna take a page out of Ilovetvalot's book and dedicate this story.
In my case, it's dedicated to my beloved almost-17-years-sober Bad Boy and Pet Beta,
who recognized some of the dialogue immediately.