March 2011 (Present Day)

"Couldn't think of anything a little warmer than golf?" Hotch complained as he and Rossi loaded their clubs into a golf cart.

"Please, it's almost sixty."

"But not quite."

"Still unseasonably warm," Rossi said. "Stop whining. The kids turning you into a whiner?"

Hotch smiled dryly. "Just so you know, it's been a while for me," he said, gazing out onto the golf course.

"Me too. Haven't had a date in months."

Hotch shook his head. "Golf, not sex."

Rossi slapped Hotch on the back as he climbed into the driver's seat. "I know, Hotch. But is that not also true?"

"That I haven't been with anyone in ohhh…" Hotch rolled his eyes up into his head. "…three or four years now? Yes, regrettably."

"I didn't know it had been that long," Rossi marveled. "But thanks for the specifics. I was really wondering."

"Haley and I divorced in oh-eight, but separated before that." Hotch shrugged.

"And you seriously haven't gotten any since then?"

"My career was my wife," Hotch quipped.

"Yeah, well, you divorced that, too. Now you sit behind a desk and stare at the clock all day."

"Well," Hotch said, shrugging again.

"So what's going on with you and Emily?" Rossi asked abruptly.

"You're not one for beating around the bush, are you?" Hotch asked as they approached the tee-off for the first hole.

"Was I ever?" They climbed out of the cart and surveyed the fairway and the winds.

"Guess not," Hotch said. "Seven-iron, you think?"

"Yup. After you."

The conversation stopped while Hotch teed his golf ball, adjusted his stance a few times, and took a couple practice swings.

"You sure you haven't been golfing in a while?" Rossi asked as the ball tapped the ground ten yards from the hole, bouncing along the green that wasn't very green yet.

"Lucky shot," Hotch said dismissively.

Rossi proceeded to hit his ball into the rough thirty yards away from Hotch's. "Dammit. I was just at the driving range."

Hotch chuckled. "Sorry."

"What's your handicap, anyway?"

"Hell if I remember," Hotch said as they got back into the cart and drove down the path toward Rossi's ball.

"So what about you and Emily?" Rossi persisted, purposely driving the cart as slowly as he could. He could see Hotch rolling his eyes and shaking his head out of the corner of his eye. "Relax. It's just me. Are things not going so well?"

"They're fine," Hotch said.

"Not stupendous, just fine?"

"Dave, how could things be stupendous? I'm a single guy living under the same roof as a single woman, raising three kids, two of whom are still in diapers, I haven't gotten laid, pardon my French, in years, I probably never will again, and I went to the store this morning to buy diapers and carpet cleaner. Tell me what about that can possibly be stupendous."

"Sounds like you have a family, Aaron. Minus the whole single man, single woman thing, which is what I was really asking about. Is that working out? You guys talked, right?"

"I've honestly lost count of how many times."

"So it took more than once?"

"You gonna swing?" Hotch said, running out of patience and pointing to Rossi's ball.

Rossi gave Hotch a sour look that indicated the conversation was nowhere near over as he dug a wedge from his bag and headed toward his ball, chipping it onto the green on his first try. Hotch joined him to finish out the hole.

"So it's taken more than one 'talk' to straighten things out, has it?" Rossi asked again.

"Yes, but I think they're finally straightened out."

"Walk me through it," Rossi called as he went to swap out his wedge for a putter.

"We're friends, that's all there is to it."

"And who decided that? You or her?"

Hotch loved Rossi, but hated these conversations. The man could see through a brick wall. "We both did," Hotch said confidently, but clearly not confidently enough.

"My ass. You waited for her to say what she needed to say, and it was the 'we can only be friends' bit, and you went along with it because you were too chicken shit to stand up for what you wanted."

"What the hell else was I supposed to do? She's right, you know. And you were right. We can't half-ass it. If either one of us has doubts then it's a bad idea."

"And you have doubts?"

"Me?" Hotch said, trying to buy himself some time while Rossi putted.

"I'm gonna get the truth outta you eventually, Aaron. We have seventeen holes left."

"Doubts about what?"

"About whether you and Emily would last," Rossi said, humoring Hotch's pathetic attempts at stalling.

"I have no doubts about whether I would want to stay with her. I guess that's all I can say."

"So she has doubts."

"Process of elimination and simple logic say yes," Hotch said.

"Then you're doing the right thing."

"I know. Thank you for stating the obvious."

"Sorry. It's not the easy thing, is it?" Rossi said sympathetically.

"Not at all." Although that admission was like peeling the scab off a healing wound, it at least opened up the door for him to be open with Rossi. Within reason, of course.

"I do feel for you, Aaron. I wish there were something I could do. But this is just a crazy situation. I would love to tell you to go for it, to chase her. If there weren't kids involved, I would. I wish things were different for you. I really do."

"Thank you," Hotch said with well-disguised confusion, unsure of whether Rossi was rooting for Team Easy or Team Responsible after all.

"So, back to snooping. Why did it take more than one talk? Did she change her mind? Did you?"

"I spoke up," Hotch said right before putting his ball right around the hole. He sighed. "I should've had that one."

"You're not focused."

"Well, you're drilling me about my love life."

"Hard to concentrate when you got booty on the brain, isn't it?"

Hotch's contagious, rarely heard, drawn-out laugh carried across the morning air further than he had intended. "Sure, something like that," he said, sinking the ball this time.

"So you spoke up?" Rossi asked in an obvious attempt to keep the conversation flowing.

"I told her the truth. I told her I thought we should go for it, that things were supposed to happen this way, that it was the only option that made sense."

"You grew a pair. Good for you. What did she say?"

Hotch and Rossi were back in the golf cart and on their way to the second hole. Am I really only one-eighteenth done with this conversation? he wondered in despair. He seriously debated giving Rossi the whole story, telling him about how things had felt so perfect, telling him about the near kiss, about the actual kiss (maybe even both of them, not just the most recent one), about everything. He still had Morgan and Reid as friends, but neither of them had ever been very close to him while he was at the BAU anyway. Rossi was always the closest he had to a best friend. "She turned me down again."

"There's something you're not telling me."

"We…didn't keep things strictly platonic," Hotch confessed.

"Couldn't make it three weeks without sleeping with her? Dammit, Aaron." Rossi sounded genuinely frustrated now.

"We didn't sleep together. We just…now this sounds stupid. We just kissed."

"How is that stupid? Some people, myself included, find a good kiss to be more intimate than sex."

"I find that hard to believe, Dave. Very hard to believe. Coming from you…"

"Hey," Rossi said, wagging a finger at Hotch. "I said more intimate, not better. So, how was it?" he asked as they cruised along.

Hotch shook his head and stared out the other side of the cart.

"Come on, first kiss. Fireworks, or nothing?"

"Wasn't the first," Hotch said with a sigh. He owed it to Rossi to be honest. And he knew Emily had discussed this matter with Garcia. That much was clear, and he wasn't angry with it. Surely she couldn't be angry with him for talking to Rossi about it. Though he hadn't realized it until now, he very much needed to talk to someone of the same sex.

"When was the first?"

"The night I signed my divorce papers. Which…to me…is essentially when it became official. The papers hadn't been turned in yet, but as far as Haley and I were concerned, it had been over long ago but that day, when I signed the papers, it was official. To us."

"An innocent man doesn't defend his actions this much before he's even been accused of anything," Rossi said wisely. "What'd you do?"

"What do you mean?"

"Kissing someone the night you sign your divorce papers, when you've legally divorced someone you emotionally divorced a long time ago—that's not really a crime punishable by death. What's the big deal? Was it more than just a peck on the lips?"

"Let's make something clear," Hotch said. "What team are you on, anyway?"

"Team? You mean whose side?"

"No, not whose side. Not my side or Emily's side. But as far as things go between me and her. One second you sound like I'm a coward for not pursuing it. The next, you're saying it's smart of us not to get involved."

"I wasn't aware you were seeking my advice," Rossi said.

"I wasn't, really, but you seemed ready to give it."

"You want my advice?"

"If you have any that isn't contradictory, sure. Doesn't mean I'll take it, though."

"Of course it doesn't. You hardly take advice from yourself."

Hotch grinned as they finally pulled up to the tee-off for the second hole on the course. "As long as we have that understanding, fire away."

Rossi waited politely for Hotch to shoot first again. "I don't think I actually know what to tell you, Aaron."

"That's fine, because I think I have the right idea."

"And what's that?"

"I had my chance with her and I blew it. I could have had her before. And maybe if the circumstances were more favorable now, I'd have another shot. But I don't think I do. I think all I can do is be the best friend I can be to her, and the best dad I can be to the kids. And hope that someday I can be satisfied with that."

"Because obviously you're not satisfied with that right now," Rossi said.

"Let's just say that when it comes to her, I'll take what I can get."

"So you're settling."

Hotch wasn't sure whether Rossi was judging or merely stating fact. "What else am I supposed to do? I mean, yeah, I could walk away, but on top of never being able to forgive myself for abandoning them, I wouldn't have her at all."

"And you're okay with the fact that you'll probably never be more than friends?"

"Like I said, I have to be." Hotch said this with a heavy heart but a light voice. From now on, he decided, no one else would have to know how hard this was for him. Everyone was better off that way.

—

"Hey," Emily called from the couch when she heard Hotch come inside through the garage door.

"Hey," he called back as he crouched down to take his shoes off. "Did Garcia already leave?"

"Yeah, just a little while ago," Emily said, turning her head away from a book she was reading, to watch Hotch enter the living room. She wanted to see if she could guess from his face how well his game had gone.

"Have a nice visit?" he asked brightly enough, stopping at the bottom of the stairs on his way up to change.

Emily smiled. "Yeah. Have a nice game, or round, or whatever?"

"Very."

"Who won?"

"Well, I haven't played in so long that I don't remember my handicap, and after all this time it wouldn't be valid anyway, so there's really no way of knowing…"

Emily spotted the slight grin on Hotch's face. "You spanked him, didn't you?"

Hotch chuckled. "Everything's relative. Dave was having an off day, so I don't really know."

"Yeah, whatever," Emily said with a smirk that said she wasn't convinced of Hotch's humility. "Glad you had a good time."

"Thanks. Where are the kids?"

"The boys are either building or destroying something with Legos upstairs. Baby's sleeping in my room."

"Want to lay on one last coat of paint?"

"Sure." Emily closed her book and followed Hotch upstairs. "And I was thinking for dinner, we could have casserole."

"Sounds good," Hotch said unenthusiastically.

"It's the last one," Emily said.

"What's the last what?" Hotch stopped in front of Emily's room.

"The last casserole. The last anything. All the stuff the guys cooked for us."

"Seriously? It's gone already?"

"It's been three weeks," she reminded him.

"Yeah, but…that was a ton of food."

Emily grinned. "I know, and we still cooked for ourselves half the time. Which means we ate more than we thought."

"Family of five goes through a lot more food than a family of two, I guess," Hotch said.

"And that's counting Charlotte, who doesn't eat any of it yet."

Hotch frowned. "Do we need to put the family on a diet?"

"I went out a notch on my belt buckle," Emily admitted. "I love my meat and cheese, but yeah. I think we might want to lay off anything that's cooked all in one pan, or find ways to cook that kind of stuff without all the fat and salt." She shamelessly patted her stomach. Hotch just laughed. "What? You haven't gained weight, too?"

"What, do I look like I have?" Hotch challenged her.

"Well, I don't know." Emily frowned and motioned for Hotch to turn around.

"No, tell me now. Do I look fatter to you?" he said, amused.

"Not fatter," Emily specified with a wicked smirk, studying Hotch's figure.

"Nice double standard we have going here," Hotch muttered under his breath.

"What do you mean?"

"You can stand here and call me fat, but I'm not allowed to comment on your weight…Not that I have anything to comment about," he added hastily.

"See? It's hard-wired into you. If I gained twenty pounds overnight, you wouldn't be able to say a thing."

"You're right."

"But for the record, I never called you fat."

"You implied," Hotch argued.

"No, you inferred. I was just joking."

Hotch smiled and shook his head. "If it makes you feel any better," he said as he started to walk away, "I had to leave early this morning to go to the mall and buy the pants I'm wearing." He stopped at his doorway and smiled only with his eyes.

"Yours didn't fit?"

"Nope."

"That makes me feel a lot better. Let the big-butt jokes begin."

A/N: Thanks for reading! As always, I'd love to hear what you think, so please leave a review (long or short, account or no account)