Prompt 4: sleep cuddles
(Hotch)
He's not sure when this happened, when Emily promising to tell him about her bad days turned into him pressing a key to his apartment into her hand and murmuring, "For the bad nights."
The first time she'd actually used the key, he'd pulled his gun on her. It had taken almost an hour for him to talk her down from the resulting panic attack.
Now she texts him when she's coming over. A simple bad night that has him making room for her in his bed. Most nights he falls asleep before she even gets there.
On rare nights, the worst nights, he keeps himself up and lets her cry herself to sleep in his arms. She tries to stay quiet, because of Jack, but one morning he'd woken up to find Jack snuggled up with Emily. It still scares him; how much the sight warmed his heart.
Tonight though, he hesitates when his phone goes off. There's a question mark where there usually isn't, like she knows she's crossing a line.
They're on a case, and while he can see how much she's suffering, letting her in feels too much like erasing that line completely.
He taps out not tonight, his thumb hovering over the send button. She's got J.J., he reasons, a much closer and more appropriate form of support. But saying no seems cruel when he remembers the tears swimming in her eyes back at the precinct, and how she'd taken a twenty minute "bathroom break", returning with bloodshot eyes that everyone had studiously ignored.
He sighs, erases his message and taps out a new one, hitting send before he can regret it. I'll leave the door open.
Minutes later, when she's securely in his arms, tears soaking through his shirt, he realizes that he'd obliterated that line when he'd first given her the key.
He can't bring himself to care.