"Oh yessir, you gorgeous, omniscient silver fox, you. Your timing could only be more perfect if your timing was named Penelope Garcia!"
Everyone around the table chuckled at Garcia as Rossi set down a tray of tequila shots on the table. As everyone reached for their shot glass and lime wedge, Rossi noted the lone glass left untouched.
"Alright. Who is turning down my generosity?"
"Your gen-er-ROSSI-ty?!" a slightly buzzed Garcia chimed in again, wagging her eyebrows up and down and laughing at her own joke. Rossi groaned at the bad word play, but Morgan reached across the table and high-fived the tech. "Good one, baby girl." Penelope grinned.
"Sorry, Dave, that's me. I don't do tequila. Too many cheap shots ended in too many bad nights in college," JJ said.
"Oh, no ma'am. I know you didn't just equate this Don Julio Real to some college dive's well swill?! Trust me, JJ. This is nothing like any tequila you've ever had." She looked at him, defiant and skeptical, until he added with a little too much sincerity for JJ to bear, "What, don't you trust me?"
With that, JJ sighed and reached out for her shot glass. Everyone beamed and held their glasses in the center, looking to Rossi for a toast.
"I've been at this a long time. Longer than some of you have been alive," he paused, notably eyeing JJ and Reid, "... but I can honestly say that this is the best group I've ever worked with. Our job, and our days, are usually difficult and surrounded by trauma. Without a group like this, none of us would survive it. But we do survive it, and that allows for days like today. Days where... just occasionally, we pull off a miracle." Everyone was nodding and smiling, knowingly.
"To the good days," Rossi finished. Through chimes of "here here!" and "to the good days!" all eight team members clinked their glasses and downed their shots, Tara laughing at Reid's face when Garcia's lime shot him in the eye. Their conversation slowly returned to normal-more laughing; more rounds of drinks. That day had, indeed, been a good day. They had been called in the morning before and sent to New Jersey after a school bus of 7th graders had been hijacked on the way to a field trip that morning. Within hours they had located the bus, and could visibly see all children were accounted for and alive. The stand-off had lasted hours, with almost all of the team members taking turns trying to negotiate with the hostage-taker. Ultimately, after over 24-hours of negotiation, they caught him dozing off and were able to sneak to the side of the bus and disarm him through a window before he could get a shot off. Every single kid had been saved-unharmed-and the unsub taken into custody and would face trial. With his criminal history, they knew he would never again be a free man.
After a little while, Derek noticed Emily repeatedly checking her phone. "Prentiss," she looked up at him. "Please tell me they aren't calling us in?" For a moment, Emily looked confused, and then looked down at her phone and she realized why he was asking. "Oh... no, no. This is... not work." She couldn't help but grin slightly.
"Oh, Miss Prentiss. Do tell!" Garcia blurted out, drawing everyone's attention to Emily, who promptly turned several shades of red.
"Please tell me you've got a date with that hottie you were telling me about the other day?" Morgan added.
"You know, some days I really really hate working with a bunch of profilers," Emily said, a joking frustration evident in her voice. "Well you're all going to read it on my face anyways, if Garcia doesn't read it by hacking into my text messages first..."
Garcia pretended to look offended before immediately nodding instead.
"Yes. I have a date. I'm actually going to have to leave here in about ten minutes. We've been trying to plan something for weeks but with our work schedules... nothing had ever worked out thus far until we got back earlier tonight than I expected. It's new; I don't have much more to add... not that I'd tell you if I did," she finished, snarkily.
Everyone around the table had different types of smiles on their faces. "Good for you, Emily," Rossi said first. Emily nodded and smiled.
After everyone seemed to return to their prior conversations, Emily reached into her purse to pull out some cash for her drinks before she left. While she was looking down, Derek asked, "What was her name again, Em? Danica? Veronica?"
"Monica," Emily said, matter-of-factly, still fishing around in her purse. With her head down, she missed the stunned look on JJ's face.
"Monica! That's right. Monica. I'm going to need to see a picture of this girl sooner or later, Em, you know that, right?" Derek added, grinning.
"Yeah, yeah. I'll be sure to get on that, Morgan," Prentiss replied.
"No need, my dear," Garcia added, fingers flying across the tablet she had whipped out of her bag. "Monica Garces. 32. Father is Ecuadorian, mother is from Connecticut. She is the youngest of three siblings and traveled a lot as a child because her father was a salesman for... it looks like a textiles company. First in her class at Stanford and top ten in her class at UC Berkley's Law School. Now a corporate attorney at a firm in DC doing most merger and acquisition work, it appears. Has a cute tri-color dog named Brice, never married, no kids. Here's her photo." Garcia finished, spinning the tablet around for everyone at the table to view.
"For fuck's sake, Garcia!" Prentiss yelped out, shaking her head. It was clear she wasn't really mad at the tech, but everyone else laughed when Garcia quickly set the tablet face down and turned ghost-white. "Too much? Yes yes, that was too much. Oh, I'm so sorry Emily, I'm just so happy for you and you know we care about you and I couldn't resist."
Emily sighed and shook her head, laughing. "No, I know. It's just that now all of you know as much about her as I do at this point," she laughed.
"Oh. Well, in that case, go. Go meet her and see those beautiful brown eyes in person and learn even more! Enjoy your date!" Garcia said as she spun Emily around about the shoulders and pushed her towards the door. Emily laughed again, "Alright, alright! See you all in the morning. 9am!" she waved over her shoulder as she walked out the front door.
"So... Monica, huh? I didn't know Prentiss dated women," Simmons said.
"Me neither," added Tara, looking around at the table to gauge how well-known this information was.
"You know, I didn't know that either, but I definitely should have figured it out. Studies have shown that approximately one in every eight people are gay, and many think that grossly underestimates the actual average in most places. There are eight of us in the unit," he added, looking around at Rossi, Morgan, Tara, Simmons, Garcia, and JJ, "chances were pretty high that one of us would not be straight."
"So," JJ said, softly, "did anyone know? Or was that just the most casual coming out ever?"
"Oh, I knew," Derek said. "So did Penelope here. I thought you knew, JJ? Or Rossi?" Derek looked at each of them. "It's not as if she hides it. Honestly, I think I found out similar to how each of you did tonight. The three of us"-he wagged his thumb between him and Garcia-"were here grabbing drinks one night and she casually mentioned an ex-girlfriend that had just walked in. Ever since, she and I have talked about women all the time. She's my favorite wingwoman," he smiled.
"Oh," JJ said. "Right."
Slowly, conversation shifted to a different topic and JJ excused herself to the restroom. She splashed a little cold water on her face and stared in the mirror for a moment before pulling her phone from her pocket. Before she realized what she was doing, she was searching "Monica Garces" on Facebook, and hastily opening the profile with the photo matching the one she saw earlier. JJ scrolled through profile and cover photos, stopping occasionally to stare at the woman on the screen. Her skin was flawless. She had bright light-brown eyes and dark hair that was slightly curly in most of the photos. Several included the dog Penelope had mentioned, and in more than a few she was laughing in a way that JJ felt like she could hear the sound coming from the screen. It was so clear what Prentiss would see in her.
JJ scrolled down further, and noted her security settings were set high enough that most of the rest of the content was blocked. The only "Friend" she could see was their one mutual-Emily Prentiss. JJ's stomach flipped slightly at seeing Emily's name affiliated with Monica's online-as if their connection was more real in that it was published. Scrolling a bit further, JJ realized she could see two of Monica's posts, though she wasn't quite sure why. The first was from a few weeks prior, and was just a photograph of a sunset with the caption, "Looking to the horizon-and it's gorgeous." JJ kept looking for a moment, still confused because she could see the security setting was still only set as "friends only," until she tapped the picture and saw it. Emily was tagged on the horizon of the photograph. JJ's stomach lurched once again. She backed out and scrolled back up to the more recent post and realized it had only been posted earlier that evening.
In the photo, two wine glasses are sitting on a coffee table with a fire place in the background. The crossed-legs of someone other than the photographer are caught just in the edge of the frame, and JJ immediately recognizes the pants and shoes Emily had been wearing. Above the photo, it was captioned, "Worth the wait. 3" and the whole post was tagged "-with Emily Prentiss."
JJ truly thought she was going to be sick. She was confused and hurt, and needed fresh air and her bed. She turned on her heels and went back out to the rest of the team at the table.
"Sorry guys, I'm gonna head out. I'm not feeling well all of a sudden. I think it was Rossi's tequila. See you in the morning," she grabbed her bag and headed for the door, leaving calls of "Feel better!" and "Get some sleep!" from her colleagues behind as she shoved open the swinging doors, gasping desperately for air to fill her rapidly-tightening chest. She just had to get home.