It wasn't as though I had expected her to wait for me.

I had been the one to tell her to leave.

I had been the one to go for Will; to completely disregard everything that I had wanted.

Everything that I had.

Had.

I suppose that is the key word here.

You never truly know what you have until it's gone.

Isn't that what they always say?

What some people choose to live by?

Or maybe it is just one of those cheesy fucking signs that people hang around their homes.

I'm pretty sure my mother had one that said exactly that.

In fact, she probably acquired it after she lost my sister.

I had told Emily to go. I had told Emily that I wanted her no longer; that I was falling hopelessly and irrevocably in love with William LaMontagne Jr. You know what? Maybe in that moment I was. Maybe in those few moments of the New Orleans case, those few moments where I was suddenly free from looking at the pictures of men with their goddamn necks slashed from ear to ear I was feeling something. I mean, you don't just leave the person you love for someone random; for someone who doesn't mean a thing to you.

You don't leave your world for something that doesn't matter.

I hadn't told Emily about Will for a long time. Hell, I refused to even think about New Orleans when the brunette was even in the same vicinity of me. Every single case that came across my desk that even so much as mentioned New Orleans was thrown in a pile for later. I couldn't hurt Emily like that. I couldn't jeopardize what we had for some experiment that I was willing to try, some accent that I was smitten by, and one case that had gotten to me.

But then suddenly, I was.

Suddenly it was as though it was the only thing to do in the world; for me to fall for William LaMontagne and his stupid accent, his stupid jeans, his stupid everything. I sound like a teenage girl at this point, but I hated Will for making me fall in love with him. I hated everything about him for a long time, which was ironic and cancelled out the fact that I was undeniably falling for him. My heart swelled every time I heard his voice over the phone, every time I felt his arms around me in the frigid air of the airport. He never failed to pick me up… Even in the New Orleans heat, though, it was cold. Freezing. Damn that place.

It wasn't always as simple as it was when I was with Emily, though. Will's thumb always had to be on top of mine, but we all knew that my thumb automatically went on top. That's always how it was with me; I liked to be able to stroke the skin of my significant other's hand. I always walked on the left hand side of the sidewalk, the outside, next to the road. Emily always said that it was my motherly instincts trying to push their way out; Will just never said a thing. He just didn't understand all of the little mannerisms that made me who I was. The ones that I did without even so much of a blink of my eye; the way that my hair was always thrown over my right shoulder when I needed it out of my face, the way that I left my slippers under the couch every night after watching television and then mumbled every morning while I searched for them, the way that I always stretched my arms up over my head and arched my back until it cracked to bring relief to my sore muscles.

Emily knew that.

Emily knew all of these things. She respected them.

But I had to let her go. What I was doing was not fair. I was stringing her along as though she was my puppet. The brunette would have done anything for me, and I knew that. She did do anything for me… Would I have done the same thing, though? In the beginning, undoubtedly. I would have sold my soul to the devil to protect Emily Prentiss, and for a while I did everything in my power to do so. However, as soon as Emily popped the question, asked me to date her, I panicked. She knew so much about me. She knew every single detail of my life that I had never told anyone else. The brunette knew what kept me up at night, what made me smile, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, what haunted my dreams when I finally did fall asleep. My favourite constellation, the way that thunder soothed me on some nights and then kept me pacing on others, my favourite movies and bands, how often I read Harry Potter, which was too often for me to admit even now. Everything. It was not as though she pried, because truly she didn't. She cared for me. Irrevocably, Emily Prentiss was in love with me.

And I was in love with her. I also, however, was scared of her. Scared to death. Emily Prentiss knew all of the deepest caverns of my soul. She knew what made me tick, what made my head work in the ways that it did, what drove me into this line of work. What made me who I was. We laid together in bed one night, my naked body pressed against hers, and suddenly I dropped my guard completely. My body relaxed and I fell asleep after her for once. Normally I waited for her so that I wasn't quite so vulnerable, but on that particular night, I gave a soft sigh and completely passed out. When I opened my eyes again, I hummed out in happiness, my face pressed against Emily's neck, and my body limp against her. It took a few moments, but I snapped awake as soon as I felt where Emily's fingertips were tracing. The marks on my hips had caused issues for me growing up; I couldn't go to the beach with my friends after my grade eleven year, I missed spring break because I couldn't wear the bikini that I had chosen over a year before, I began to force myself to focus only on my studies, not to get intimate with anyone. Ever.

But then there was Emily.

I jumped up from my position against her, holding the blanket to my chest in order to cover my body, which in return caused Emily's body to be completely exposed. She wouldn't care though. I knew she wouldn't care. My arms scrambled to hold the blanket up to my body, my blue eyes wide in fear. No one had ever seen them before. No one had ever been close enough to see them, and now here we were. I was embarrassed. I was hurt. I was shocked. Never did I ever think that I would be alright with people seeing the marks that I had self inflicted to my skin. The trails that were created at first by a pencil sharpener that I had deconstructed in grade seven, from a razor that I had torn apart in a panic attack in grade eight, from a box cutter that I had found in my dad's shed in grade ten. Each year it was a little deeper, each year there was a little more blood that managed to drip into the ivory coloured bathtub that my mother treasured for years. The one that she had replaced after finding my sister dead in it years before.

I had hated myself at first; hated the pain and the marks that were created by my own hand. With a small whimper after one particularly rough night, I swore to myself that never would drag another blade across my skin. Ever. That didn't last long at all. The following week, my hips were hacked so badly that I had to wear sweatpants to school… And that was saying a lot.

Emily spoke calmingly and soothingly to me as soon as I jolted up and pulled away from her touch, but I knew immediately that things had changed. The brunette knew something that literally no one else had ever known about me, and I had never felt as exposed as I did in that one moment.

We lasted only a few more weeks together, both of us feeling the drifting between us that seemed to never end. Emily Prentiss still wanted to give me the world, I was willing to let her, but I was not willing to open myself up. The Jareau family had been notorious for running away from their problems, and I was definitely no exception.

Will was great, truly. He never pried, he never asked. Hell, I was pretty sure he never even realized any of the things that triggered the way that I acted, the way that I would occasionally shut down, break down, hurt. I loved him, truly. I did. But I was not in love with him, and I think that even he knew that near the end of things. I had only ever been in love once, and I had let her go. How could I?

When she came back to Quantico with talks of her boyfriend, Mark, it wasn't fair for me to feel the things that I did. Jealousy? Resentment? Hate? Anger? Sadness? All of the above. It was as though both my heart and my head were going to explode, and the tears that were building up in my eyes felt as though they were going to pour down my cheeks at any second. I needed to get away, to run as far as I could, but ironically the only place that I wanted to be was in none other than Emily Prentiss' arms. I wanted her to wrap me up in them, to hold me to her body, to run her fingers through my hair to calm me down and to tell me that it was all one big joke. Life is one big fucking cosmic joke after all, isn't it? The only person who I was able to run to would be Will. William LaMontagne. The person that I had chosen over Emily, over the love of my life. The man that I had married in order to patch up my broken heart. The heart that I had broken myself all because I couldn't face my damn fears.

It wasn't as though I had expected her to wait for me.

I've been thinking about her a lot lately. Her touch, her yawn every morning, the way she cracks every one of her fingers and then every one of her toes, the way she always kept a glass of water next to the bed, the way that she sat up and made the most exaggerated noises as she stretched in the morning. How her eyes looked up to the stars when we laid on the deck at night, the brown speckled with enthusiasm and pure engagement. I swore that I could see every one of the stars that dotted the sky reflected in those beautiful eyes of hers.

With the thoughts of her running through my mind that night, I turned on the tap in the washroom and sat myself on the edge of the bathtub, razor in hand.

I had been thinking about this a lot lately, too.