A glance at the alarm clock on the bedside table told Emily that it was well after midnight. She'd only landed in DC four hours ago, been running on fumes for three days before that. By all reasonable expectations, she should be well and truly exhausted by now. Should have been fast asleep from the moment her head hit the pillow.
Instead, though, she lay in bed, listening to Andrew snore like a chainsaw. With her back turned to him to shield the light from her phone screen, she used her thumb to scroll through pictures of the team. She paused, lingered...
It was a picture of her and Derek taken at JJ's wedding, the two of them captured mid-dance, mid-laugh, pure joy sparkling in both their eyes – hers focused on the camera, his solely on her. It was her favourite picture of the two of them and, lately, the one she found herself gravitating to the most.
She liked looking at it because it was the only time she could quite remember what it felt like to be with him, to be together. The only time she could quite remember him. Them.
Granted, them had only ever been in the context of friends and partners. Maybe there had always been the undercurrent of something potentially more, but they'd never quite crossed that line together.
(The night that picture had been taken had, perhaps, been the closest they'd ever come... As the wedding had drifted to a close, he'd offered to drive her home and, though she wasn't drunk, she'd accepted. Maybe it was because the stark realization of how little time they had left together had really started to set in...she couldn't have been sure. She'd invited him up to her apartment, but rather than accept the offer, he'd kissed her cheek softly and said goodnight.)
As if he were sharing her thoughts in that moment, her phone screen flashed with his name and she had to answer it before it started ringing. "Derek, is everything alright?" she asked, voice barely even a whisper lest Andrew wake and overhear.
The thing was, though he'd never come right out and said it, Andrew didn't trust Derek. She couldn't have said what the specific reasons were, though if she'd had to guess, she had a strong feeling he suspected there was more between them than they let on...
Derek's voice was low and gravelly in her ear. "Princess..." he uttered, sighed. It was clear there was something he wanted to say, but couldn't quite manage the words.
She carefully slipped out from under Andrew's arm where it was slung across her waist, clutching her almost possessively, and tiptoed from the room. At the threshold, she paused, glanced back at her still sleeping boyfriend and wondered why those words felt like a weight on her chest.
"I know it's late," Derek continued in her ear. "But I knew – well, I hoped...maybe you were awake too."
She frowned, sighed. "How much have you had to drink tonight?" she asked pointedly. Lately, it seemed like he only ever wanted to talk when imbued with the false confidence of too much liquor running through his veins.
"Nothing," he insisted, too quickly. A beat. "Well, a few, but I'm not drunk."
"You can't keep doing this," she whispered at length, letting the statement hang in the air, waiting for him to protest. She paced the hallway, trying to ignore the pictures hung there – Andrew and Keeley and the recent addition of the three of them together – because she couldn't make these two worlds exist simultaneously in her head.
He seemed to ignore her insistence (if it could even be called that, given how weak it had been), continuing on, "Do you remember that picture of the two of us at JJ's wedding?"
She shrugged, though he couldn't hear it over the phone. "What about it?" Like she hadn't just been staring at that very photo, wanting that moment back.
Almost apropos of nothing, he seemed to change the subject, "I know you're seeing someone, but... God, Em, what are you doing with him?"
"I... We... I mean, we're..." she stammered, internally cursing her sudden lack of coherent speech.
Suddenly, he almost lashed out, "You're with him now, aren't you?" He waited and, when no answer seemed forthcoming, he seemed to take her silence as an affirmative answer. "When are you going to tell him that it's over?" he asked.
"Over?" she repeated dumbly. "Why... Why would I..." She still couldn't seem to find the end to any of her sentences, but in this case it was less out of lack of answer than it was an inability to admit the answer.
"You know there's always been something between us," he said, maintaining his sudden drunken boldness. "We should be together. We should be together now. I don't know why we're still wasting time pretending otherwise."
She sighed again – heavier, wearier. "I really don't think..." she started to protest.
"I know you don't love him," he interrupted. "I see it in the way you look at me. You can pretend all you want to everyone else – hell, to yourself even – but you can't lie to me. I know you too well."
She chewed her lip nervously, struggling to find a response – any response – to his vehement insistence. "Derek, I..."
"Don't lie to me," he insisted again, firmer. "You owe me that much."
"Why?" she demanded, the word coming out breathless. "Why do I owe you anything? I tried to give you my heart that night and you refused it! You were the one who shut things down before they even had a chance to begin." She huffed, doing her best to keep her voice level and quiet. "You don't just get to demand things anymore – you had your chance. I'm happy now and..."
He interrupted, "Are you?"
Emily frowned. "Am I what?"
"Happy..." Several long moments of silence passed. So long, in fact, that Derek started to wonder if she'd hung up on him. "Emily?" he whispered.
A heaved breath rattled down the line and it could've been a longing sigh (or it could just as easily have been a frustrated huff). "What do you want me to say to that?" she snapped then. (Frustrated huff, apparently, was the answer.)
He shrugged, even though she couldn't see the gesture. "You could try telling me the truth for once," he suggested. Then, before she could get defensive and reply with blind denial, he continued, "Don't you think we've been lying to ourselves long enough?"
The silence that followed was – if possible – even longer and more brittle.
Then, "Andrew is happy. Sometimes that's enough."
"That's not an answer," he replied, though it was, in a roundabout way. "If you can't even pretend you're happy, what's stopping you from saying it?"
She didn't have to ask what she meant by it, she already knew. She didn't bother feigning ignorance, couldn't muster the strength to pretend. Couldn't muster the strength to answer either, if for no other reason than that she didn't have an answer. At least, not a good one.
For Derek, no answer was, apparently, almost as good a response than the actual words he longed to hear. "I'm not asking you to hurt him," he said, "I'm only saying that you shouldn't have to suffer for someone else's happiness."
Ordinarily, she might have argued with him, if over nothing more than his choice of words. That night, though, suffering felt like a pretty apt descriptor. It seemed to be the thing she was best at. Almost apropos of nothing, she asked, "What would you have me do? Wake him up right now, in the middle of the night, and feed him some garbage 'it's not you, it's me' platitude?"
He knew it was a rhetorical question, but he answered anyway. "If that's what works for you..." Even he wasn't sure if he was joking or not and he could almost hear Emily's glare, even over the phone. "Look, Princess, you can tell him the truth or spare his feelings. You can tell him you'll still be friends, if that eases your conscience. But you have to tell him you're not in love. It's the right thing to do."
"The right thing?" she asked, "Or the right thing for you?" She was deflecting and they both knew it.
Normally, he would've let her get away with it, but tonight he refused to play that game. "No, Emily. You can't turn this around on me and make me feel uncomfortable so you don't have to feel your feelings or whatever emotional bullshit you do when something hits too close to home. You would've hung up on me long ago if I weren't at least a little bit right."
"Derek," she pleaded, voice cracking slightly. "Don't..." She paused, shook her head, sighed. "Just...don't."
"Don't what?" he asked, just a little bit incredulous. "Don't care about you? Don't want you to be happy? Don't give a damn?"
Her breath was coming in shallow gasps, unable to get a full breath in past the lump of tears lodged in her throat. "Don't," she repeated, desperate and urgent. "Don't act like this is easy for me!"
And, if Derek Morgan had one weakness, it was her unhappiness. The sound of her tears threatening hit him square in the chest and he could feel himself softening. "Em, I don't want to push you. Do it tonight, tomorrow...next week, next year. It's your life. And all I want is for you to be happy with how you're spending it. And who you're spending it with.
"That person doesn't have to be me. I wish it would be, but...I just... I don't think it should be him." A beat. "Break up with him."