The Girl in Red


Rebecca opens the study door slowly and peeps around it. She sees Hotch sitting at the desk reading something. Rebecca knows that's she is not supposed to disturb her father when he is working, but she is bored. Her mother and Jack are not home and she does not want to play by herself anymore. She wants to play with someone and he is the only one that is home, and she has a really good idea to what they can do together.

"Is there something I can do for you, Becky?" he asks without looking up from the case file he is reading. Rebecca pushes the door fully open and walks into the study. She leans over the desk and places her head in her hands. Rebecca does not say anything but just looks at him. He can feel her staring at him and he cannot concentrate. He sighs. "Becky, stop staring at me and just tell me what you want."

"I want you to help me paint my room."

"What?" he asks surprised.

"I want to paint my room and I want you to help me, because I'm only seven and can't do it myself."

"Okay."

"What?" This time it was Rebecca's turn to look surprised. "We are really going to paint my room?"

"Yes we are." He closes the file and walks to Rebecca. "So, what color do you want?" He asks sitting down on the edge of the table.

She turns her head in her hands to look at him. "I want a sky."

"Sky?"

Rebecca nods and stands up straight. "I want blue walls with big white clouds, a sun and a rainbow. Everything you see in the sky," she explains with a big smile and hand gestures.

He smiles. "Well if that is what you want then we better go out and get some paint." He takes Rebecca's small hand in his own and they walk out of the study. She looks up at him. "Are we really doing this daddy?"

He picks her up from the floor. "If you want us to paint your room then we will do it."

"But don't you have to work?"

He kisses her on the cheek. "I can work tomorrow."

/

Rebecca lays the brush by the bucket of light blue paint and sits down on her plastic covered chair. Everything in her room is covered in see-through plastic so that it will not get paint on it. 'Maybe she should have been covered in plastic too,' Hotch thinks as he looks at Rebecca. She has paint everywhere. On her face, on her clothes – but they are old so it is okay – on her hands and in her hair. He wonders how they will ever be able to get the blue paint out of her hair.

"When will the paint be dry daddy?" Rebecca asks as she rubs her nose with the palm of her hand.

"Well," he looks around at the walls, "it's supposed to be quick drying paint, so we should be able to start painting clouds on this wall now," he says patting the left side wall.

"Okie dokie," Rebecca says with a big smile as she gets up and finds a new brush. Hotch opens the bucket with the white paint and Rebecca dips her brush in it. "You do the high clouds and I do the low clouds, but no dripping paint on my head!"

"I will try not to," he says and finds a brush. He dips it in the paint and with a quick movement of the hand the outline of a cloud is on the wall just over Rebecca's head. He fills it up by dabbing the head of the brush over and over again on the same area. When he is finished with the first one he turns to Rebecca and says, "So what do you think?" She looks up at the cloud but does not say anything. "You don't like it like that?"

"How did you do it?"

"Like this." He takes his brush and shows her. "It's not very difficult."

"Can we do it like you do on all of them?"

"You like it like that?"

"It looks really pretty daddy," Rebecca says with a smile and then dips her brush in the paint and does as he had shown her.

For some time neither of them says anything, they just paint one cloud after another in silent and when all walls – but the one with the window – are covered with white clouds in many different shapes and sizes they put away their brushes. Rebecca looks from wall to wall with a big smile. "Now we are almost done."

"What do you want to do now?"

"I want to paint the rainbow, but by myself."

"Then what do you want me to do?"

She looks around the room and then smiles. "Can we paint my bedside lamp as a sun?"

He looks at it. It is round and hangs good high on the wall to make a great sun if it just gets a bit of yellow paint. "Yeah why not."

"Yaaay!" Rebecca claps her hands. "But maybe there should be something more on one of the walls." She looks thoughtful at the wall in front of her.

"Maybe there could be a plane." Hotch says.

"Yes! But not a plane. A jet!"

"A jet? Why a jet?"

Rebecca rolls her eyes at him. "Come on dad! You and mom fly on a jet all the time, so of course it has to be a jet."

"How silly of me to forget that," he says with a grin and grabs a small brush and the white and black paint, so that he can mix a light grey color for the jet. Rebecca gets the bucket with green and is just about to start painting when she thinks of something and turns to Hotch. "Oh! And can you make small smiling faces in the windows? You know, so it looks like you and mommy are smiling at me?"

He smiles so both dimples are showing. "I will do my best."

"Great!" she says and sends him an even bigger smile, before she turns back to get started on the rainbow.

/

Emily hangs the clothes on the dressing room door. She really only wanted to try on the blue blouse, but Garcia and JJ had convinced her to try on a lot of other things – one being a beautiful long red dress that she did not really know when she would be able to use. It was not like she and Hotch really had time to go out. She takes off her shoes, pants and shirt and for a moment she just looks at herself in the big mirror. She turns to one side and then the other as she lets her hands move over her pale skin. She looks herself over again and again and she actually likes what she sees. For a woman her age she looks good – really good.

She shakes her head and with a grin she turns to the door and the big amount of clothes on it. She decides to try on the red dress first, so she takes it off the hanger and pulls it over her head. The dress is still over her chest when she hears the first lines of Uncle Kracker's "Smile" fill the dressing room. She quickly tries to pull the dress down with one hand while she fanatical looks through her bag with the other. But when she finally gets a hold of her phone it has already stopped ringing and she is just about to check who had called when there is a knock on the door.

"Come in," she says putting her phone away.

Garcia opens the door. "Your daughter wants to know why you are not answering your phone."

"I didn't get to it in time," she says and holds her hand out for the phone.

Garcia hands it over and looks Emily up and down. "You look hot!"

She rolls her eyes and places the phone by her ear. "What's up Becky?" she asks while trying to close the zipper in the side of the dress.

"Where are you?"

She places the phone between her shoulder and ear. "Oh, I'm in a dressing room trying on some clothes." She pulls on the zipper hard and almost drops the phone. So instead of trying again she quickly says. "Hold on a moment sweetie." She lays the phone of the chair and zips up the zipper. "I'm back."

"Does you being in a dressing room mean that you are not in the car on your way home?"

She wrinkles her eyebrows. "Yes that is what it means. Are you okay honey?"

"Yeah I'm fine. Daddy just said that I could talk to you if you were driving and if you were on your way home then I wouldn't need to call you because then you wouldn't be able to buy what I really want you to buy for me."

"And what must that be?"

"Stars that glows in the dark."

"And why would you need those?"

"For my room! The sky room or the rainbow room, I haven't really decided on which one yet."

"Rebecca, what are you talking about?" she asks confused.

"My room. I painted it."

"You what?"

"Daddy helped me."

She sighs. "Please let me speak with your father."

"Oh, okay."

Emily pinches the bridge of her nose and waits in silent till Hotch says, "How is shopping going?"

She ignores his question. "You painted Becky's room?"

"Well yes. She really wanted to and it was just the two of us home so I thought it was a good idea and something for her and me to do together."

She sighs. "I told Rebecca last week that she couldn't have her room painted till after her birthday."

"Why?"

"Because our daughter is too spoiled and she needs to learn how it is to have to wait for things." She can hear him laugh at her reply. "But it's true!"

"Why didn't you tell me that?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know." She sighs. "It doesn't matter; I will buy the stars and be home as quickly as possible."

"Okay, see you later honey."

"Yeah bye." She hangs up the phone, lets out a deep sigh and looks at herself in the mirror. The red dress is really pretty and looks good on her. She shakes her head with a smile and mumbles to herself, "Maybe my seven year-old daughter has already stopped listening to me, but at least I still look hot."

/

"You are really good at making planes," Emily whispers as she looks at each of the walls in the dim light of Rebecca's bedside lamp – or the sun as Rebecca calls it. The room looks really pretty, but she is still kind of mad at Rebecca for asking her father to paint the room with her when she had already been told no one time before.

"It's not a plane, it's a jet," he says with a smile and wraps an arm around her shoulder.

"A jet? Why a jet?"

"Because that is what we fly in."

She smiles. "Of course and I'm guessing that the two people in the window smiling and waving is you and me."

"That's right." He kisses her on the side of her head.

She giggles and lays her head on his shoulder. "Maybe the whole room-painting-thing wasn't that bad anyway."

"And Rebecca seems to really love her room."

"And Rebecca would also really love it if she could get some sleep, but she doesn't see that happing anytime soon if the two of you keep standing in here talking," Rebecca mumbles from under her covers.

"Sorry sweetie," Emily says with a laugh and switches of the sun and then both parents walk out and close the door to the rainbow room after them.