A/N: This is hotchityhotchhotch here. Sorry this took so long to write! Normally updating quickly is not an issue for me, but this story with its unique setup and AU aspect takes a different kind of thinking, I suppose.

Some reviewers wondered about Haley. We can tell you that she will be in the story but that her character's time line will be different.

One more thing: While each chapter will have a unique genre, there will be overarching themes of romance and humor.

Genre: Humor

Author: hotchityhotchhotch

"Working hard or hardly working?" a familiar, rich voice said to Hotch's left. He jumped out of his half-sleep and saw Emily standing at the open driver's side window of his surveillance vehicle parked at the end of her mother's driveway.

"E—Emily, wow!" he said brightly. "You're back." He met her dark, excited eyes for only a second before she disappeared from view. He turned his head and saw her walking toward the back of the car from his side view mirror. She reappeared in the passenger seat as if it were the most normal thing in the world to hop into a surveillance vehicle with an FBI agent who worked for her mother.

"Miss me?" Emily said with a smirk.

"Well, it has been a little more boring, I can say that much," Hotch replied.

"Apparently," Emily said. "Sleeping on the job, I see." She gave him a chiding look.

"I was not sleeping. I was resting my eyes."

"I just graduated form Yale. Don't insult my intelligence."

"Ooh, snobby about your alma mater already, are you?" Hotch tucked his hands behind his head and leaned back in his seat again, wondering only fleetingly whether it was appropriate for Emily to be in the car with him. She was an adult. They weren't doing anything inappropriate, just chatting…

"Hey, Yale was the one thing in my life that wasn't handed to me. I got in on my own good grades, took out loans—"

"You footed the bill yourself?" Hotch asked, cocking his head Emily's way.

"Yeah. I wanted to start doing things for myself. When you move around all the time as a kid, your parents try to make up the emotional struggle with other things—gifts, stuff like that…I never really felt like I got anything on my own. They always tried to make things almost too easy for me."

"Hmm."

"What? Sorry, did that sound kind of self-righteous?" Emily said hastily. "Wow, it did."

"Just a bit," Hotch said, grinning and holding his forefinger and thumb close together.

"Wow, I haven't seen you in what, two and a half months, and I make a total ass of myself right off the bat," Emily said offhandedly. "And I have a dirty mouth all of a sudden."

Hotch just smiled into the sunlight and let Emily find her way out of the hole she'd dug.

"Let's talk about something else besides what a schmuck I am," Emily said eagerly, rotating in her seat and tucking a foot underneath her.

"All right. How was the rest of the semester?"

"Good, good," Emily said with a slow nod. "Only had to sleep with one of my professors this time," she said offhandedly.

Hotch knew the second his head jerked to the side again that Emily was joking, but two or so months away from her had made him forget about how cavalier her humor was. It was much like his, albeit a little more uncouth, so he wasn't sure why it was so surprising to him.

"So now what?"

"Now what, what?"

"Going to look for a job?" Hotch asked. "I hear the ice cream places are hiring for the summer."

"Funny. I hear the mall is looking for rent-a-cops." Emily laughed at her own joke and Hotch, his ego undeniably bruised a little at her jab, just rolled his eyes and tried not to smile.

"When did you get back, anyway?" Hotch asked suddenly. "Why didn't you didn't come back right after commencement with your parents?"

"Had some…parties to attend. Look out your door," Emily said.

"Look out my—?" Hotch leaned out his window a bit and saw two duffel bags sitting on the driveway. "So your first stop was to come bug me?"

"And make you help me unload my car. There's plenty more where that came from," Emily said.

"I'm not relieved for another hour," Hotch said.

"Oh, come on. You were sleeping until I came and woke you up. You weren't doing any better of a job then than you would be helping me unpack."

"I was resting my eyes."

"Come on," Emily said with confidence, getting out of the car and shutting her door. When Hotch didn't immediately follow, she leaned into the window, clutching the top of the car with her hands. "Come on," she repeated.

"In an hour," Hotch said firmly, smiling straight out through the windshield. Emily sighed. "In an hour," he said again. He glanced in her direction, but that was a mistake. She had to have picked out that low-cut blouse just to torture him. She knew he was single—relationship status had come up in conversation before she'd left for school after her spring break. And he knew she was single. At least, as of her leaving, she had been. Was she really trying to seduce him?

Emily considered telling Hotch her eyes were "up here" but decided against it. She couldn't purposely torture him and then tease him about his reaction. That would just be too cruel. "Fine. I'll come back out in an hour." Emily started walking away.

"Wait, Emily," Hotch called.

She walked slowly back to the car. "Yes?"

"You forgot your duffle bags."

"Oh no, that's your job," she said with a cheeky grin.

—

"I'm not going to lie. I feel uncomfortable," Hotch murmured to Emily when they got the first load of her belongings up to her room. He'd only ever been in the Ambassador's office and his own "office," really. But now he was upstairs in one of several bedrooms that sat inside the gargantuan home, with a boxful of Emily's books.

"Why?" Emily asked incredulously. "You've been in the house a million times," she said as she heaved a heavy garment bag onto her bed.

"Not in your room, though." Hotch setting the box down on the floor at the foot of Emily's bed.

"Hotch, seriously. It's not like I'm twelve. I'm allowed to have boys in my room."

"Boys that work for your mother?"

"I'm sure she'd rather I sleep with you than the gardener," Emily said with a shrug of her shoulders on her way back out of the room. She patted Hotch on the shoulder as she passed. Hotch's eyes grew wide in fright at the idea of anyone having heard that. As terrified as he was, though, the man in him couldn't help but imagine what sleeping with her might be like. Amazing, he was sure. But also highly inappropriate. "Oh, Mother, hello!" Emily chirped.

"Mother" was one of the last words Hotch wanted to hear after the lewd remark Emily had just made.

"Hello, dear. I didn't know you'd arrived. Hello, Agent Hotchner. What exactly are you—"

"He's helping me unpack. And don't worry, he refused fifty times but I told him if he didn't listen to me, I'd get him fired." Emily smiled at her bewildered mother and kissed her on the cheek.

"Yes, well, as long as you understand she's completely…full of it, for lack of a better term, Agent Hotchner," Ambassador Prentiss said with a slight grin.

"Fully understood, ma'am," Hotch said with a serious nod.

"Oh, how many times do I have to ask you to call me Elizabeth? You've been here how many months now?"

"Not enough to call you by your first name, ma'am," Hotch said with a respectful smile, his hands tucked neatly behind his back.

"Well, don't let Emily keep you here. If you're off duty, feel free to stop working." She gave her daughter a reproachful look.

"I don't mind helping," Hotch insisted. He followed Emily to the front of the house to get more of her things.

"Not enough to call you by your first name, ma'am," Emily mocked in a deep voice when they got back out to her car.

"This job does demand a certain level of respect," Hotch said, accepting the suitcase Emily passed him from her trunk. And another.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Emily moaned. "Stay for dinner," she said out of nowhere.

"What? No, I can't."

"Oh come on," Emily said, walking back up the sprawling driveway to the front door. "Big feast tonight to celebrate my return."

"All the more reason not to."

"Oh, it's nothing formal. I'm still wearing jeans," Emily said. "Just more food than usual. And more booze. My dad will get sloshed, my mother will roll her eyes and only stay at the table for an hour, tops, so she can go hide in her office again, and we can sit and enjoy ourselves."

"Sounds like a blast," Hotch said, "but I think I'll pass. Thank you, though. It just feels a bit inappropriate."

"Tell me something," Emily said when they arrived at the bottom of the stairs. She stopped in her tracks and Hotch almost ran into her.

"What?"

"Are you a gentleman?"

"I'd like to think so."

"Well, it isn't very gentlemanly to turn down a dinner invitation from a lady, is it?" Emily raised her eyebrows at Hotch as if to dare him to refuse her offer again.

"I doubt your parents want the help at dinner with them," Hotch said once they got to Emily's room again.

"The help? Are you serious? You are not the help. And for the record, the housekeepers do eat with us from time to time. But you're an FBI agent. Your job is a little more important than dusting the curio cabinets."

"I'm still not family. This is an important occasion. You should just be with your family."

"Give me that," Emily said firmly, holding her hand out for a suitcase. She took it from him and set it on her closet floor. "Who cares if you're not family? You're my friend, aren't you?" She snatched the other suitcase out of his hand.

Hotch smiled. "I don't know, am I?"

"You let me give you a nickname," Emily pointed out.

"Okay…"

"So come to dinner as my friend."

—

Hotch had always been a rather confident person. He rarely doubted himself, rarely felt ill at ease, and if he did feel those things, he excelled at pretending he didn't. But he had a feeling that fate, destiny, God—someone or something—had put Emily in his path just to mess with him. He felt like a teenager meeting a date's parents for the first time, even though the only way he could picture dating Emily was in his imagination (and even there, the possibility of them being together was laughable). He couldn't remember the last time he'd been so nervous.

"Thanks again for helping out," Emily said with a smile as she and Hotch made their way to the dining room shortly after they had finished unpacking Emily's car.

"Of course."

"I hope you don't feel like I really forced you. I didn't think you'd mind."

"I didn't, at all," Hotch said honestly.

"Good. And I hope you don't mind coming to dinner."

"I do mind. I thought we'd established that," Hotch said dryly.

"Oh, lighten up. It's just food."

"With a United States Ambassador."

"Whom you see every day," Emily said.

"Who did not invite me to dinner."

"But the guest of honor did. Trust me, she'll be fine with it."

"Yeah, right," Hotch murmured.

"Agent Hotchner, what a pleasant surprise," said Emily's mother, slightly bewildered, and just about to sit down at their long mahogany dining room table.

"I invited him to stay. It was the least I could do for him helping me unpack," Emily explained. She took a seat across from her mother.

"We're glad to have you."

"Agent Hotchner, nice to see you again. It's been a while," said Emily's father, extending a hand across Emily. Hotch shook it.

"Please, sir, call me Aaron. Thank you for having me."

"Our pleasure," Mr. Prentiss said jovially.

Hotch seemed so anxious that Emily decided not to purposefully embarrass him during dinner. Conversation was light and sparse. Emily's graduation from Yale was brought up, as were her foggy plans for her future, but neither conversation went very deep.

Mr. Prentiss, a little sweaty and pink in the face, excused himself for another drink not long after his wife had left the table; he never came back.

"See, that was painless," Emily said consolingly once they were alone. She poured herself another glass of wine and offered some to Hotch as well.

"No, thanks. I have to drive home, remember?" Hotch took a sip of water instead.

"You mean you don't want to spend the night?"

Hotch choked on his water and beat at his chest when he couldn't get the water up with two coughs.

Emily giggled in a self-satisfied way next to him. He gave her the stink eye and sat back in his chair. "So do you antagonize your mother all the time?" he asked after a pause, his eyes still watering.

"Eh, once in a while I get in the mood to see her squirm."

"So you're using me to bother your mother. Great."

"Ohh, did you think I really liked you? That's so cute," Emily said in a pitiful tone, laying a hand across Hotch's back.

Hotch looked only mildly amused when he turned to her. She flashed him a pearly smile and, without thinking, leaned in and kissed him quickly on the cheek. "Friends help friends drive their mothers crazy, right?"

Hotch, his face lit on fire, nodded. "I suppose. Then I've fulfilled my duties as a friend?"

"Unless you want to be friends with benefits," Emily said flippantly. "Man, you get worked up easily," she said, chuckling, when Hotch's expression went from surprised at her kiss to terrified at her proposal.

"You're…"

"Crazy? I know. Everyone at school was always so uptight, and I'm ambitious too, don't get me wrong, but I can only take so much peace and quiet and boredom. And when I come home it's usually the same thing, just in a damn mansion instead of a dorm room or an apartment."

"So you're not always this crazy?"

"You sounded hopeful when you asked that," Emily said slowly.

"Did I? I didn't mean to. I could use some crazy in my life."

"Good. Because we have four months to pack in all the crazy before you leave."

We? Hotch thought. "You don't think you'll maybe leave before I do? What if you find a job?"

Emily shrugged and tossed her long dark hair over her shoulder. "We'll see. This might be one of those 'find myself' types of summers."

"Ah, I remember those," Hotch said, leaning back in his seat again and closing his eyes. "I miss those."

"Oh, come on, you're not that much older than I am. Don't try to make me feel like a kid. What are you, twenty-eight?"

"Twenty-seven, but thanks," Hotch said. "You can't be older than twenty-two if you just finished college. You did only take four years, right?"

"Paying my own way? You bet I finished in four years. Tried to make it three, but I decided I wanted to have a life while I was there and not be studying twenty-four-seven."

"So you are twenty-two?"

"I thought you said you were a gentleman," Emily said sneakily.

"Ah, that I did. Then I rescind my question about your age."

"Good boy." Emily shot him her best set of bedroom eyes over the rim of her wine glass.

"I'd better get going," Hotch sighed. Emily, pouting behind Hotch's back, followed him to the front door. It wasn't until this moment, in last sliver of sunlight, that she appreciated the way his long bangs tickled his forehead. Her fingers begged to run through his thick brown hair, but she controlled them for now.

Although she was unsure about her future, unsure about so many things, she was one hundred percent certain that she would eventually give in to her baser instincts if he didn't first. Maybe he was a little older, but not too old. And maybe he did work for her mother, but not directly. He was assigned to her. There had to be a difference.

"What?" Hotch said as they both stood right outside the doorway.

"You spilled red sauce on your tie," Emily said. She'd been holding onto that one all throughout dinner in case she needed a distraction. And the way she stared at him longingly right now definitely warranted some sort of distraction so her cover wasn't blown.

Hotch quickly grabbed his tie. "I did. How long ago did you notice?"

"After your first bite."

"What did I ever do to you?"

A/N: Thanks for reading! Much lighter humor than I normally write, for those of you who read my other fanfic. But it's a completely different dynamic since they're younger and hardly know each other.

SussiRay will be writing the next chapter. The genre will remain a secret until it's posted!

Please leave a review if you have time :)