"I'm back." Emily says cheerfully as she enters his office. She walks to the front of his desk not even asking for permission. She was beginning to feel more at home in the BAU. "Thank you for letting me go to dinner with my mother, I'll get started on the paperwork." She never expected to say those words out loud.

"I was surprised by your call, but I think I'm even more surprised right now." Aaron is unsure if he should even consider making conversation with her, but his curiosity is even bigger than his fear of doing something wrong. Besides, there was a desk between them, and his blinds were open. The perfect environment for a talk between two colleagues, sometimes friendly colleagues, sometimes something more that remains nameless.

It was not like he was thinking of her every second of the day. Of how he truly wishes that he had kissed her already. No, he doesn't think about that when he sees his son smile so brightly that reminds him of Emily's eyes. He thinks about her even less when his wife is already asleep when he gets home and in the morning she refuses to talk about his work. He doesn't miss being in a car following a suspect and drinking milkshakes -that remind him of his childhood- with her in those moments.

"Oh, well." Emily sits making herself physically comfortable to approach this conversation. "I don't know, today… She was great, really great." She emphasizes both 'great'. "I guess… after helping us with the case, she earned a chance." Her voice is soft, letting some vulnerability show. She can't help it, her mother makes her like that, like a child.

"Did she make the best out of it?" Aaron knows that he's navigating tumultuous waters, but he can sense that she needs a friend. He's not sure if she trusts anybody from the team enough to let them know her issues with her mother so he has to be there for her. He drew the short straw, and that was it. It wasn't that he was concerned about her, no.

Well, maybe he was.

Out of nervousness, she begins to pick her nails. "Yeah…" She exhales very slowly and he raises his eyebrow instantly. Her tell. "I mean, she's still my mother. She still implied that I'm wasting my life, that I'm getting too old to be single." Emily huffs letting go of some tension. "She asked when am I planning to have children which I wish I had an answer for, and she was very vocal about not liking my job." The usual stuff.

Aaron can feel she's not letting herself be too vulnerable, and he hates it. He hates that nothing has been the same after that moment that Reid interrupted a week ago. They act the same, but they don't behave the same. He smiled at her when she was humble about her russian, but he didn't say anything. He can already feel Gideon being too observant of their interactions so he has been more careful. However, they still talked.

They didn't have a case during that time, but they were the first ones to arrive and the last ones to leave. They shared coffee breaks and some conversations in his office about everything and anything at the same time. They even worked on some consultations together. So far, they have been discreet about their bond, too discreet. It felt illicit and they were doing nothing more than enjoying each other's company. One may think that after being interrupted before cheating on his wife, his need for her would lessen. It hasn't. For seven days, at the office, they were blissfully ignorant of how close they were becoming.

Not being able to handle his silence, Emily turns to look out the window. Even without seeing him, she can feel his intense eyes on her. He ends up winning the silent battle and she twists her head back, staring directly at him. "But… she was more subtle about it, it was as if she was almost trying to understand it." She looks at her lap seeing how her fingers are tearing her nails apart, she intertwined her hands together to prevent further damage. That only makes her start pressing her nails to her skin. She needed to feel something that she could understand.

He says nothing as a sign that she could vent more if she wanted. She could tell him all her sorrows and problems and he would listen. He has done it, but he's aware that a conversation with her mother can send Emily into a dark abyss.

Emily sees the look she was getting used to and she feels safe. Whatever happened now would fit into that limbo where they seemed to interact, "She's trying, I can see it, but I'm not sure if I'm ready to…" She stops to take her time to find the right word, or better said the right feeling.

"Forgive her." But before she could pinpoint it, he did it for her. She doesn't know if he's that good at his job or if they are at that point where he could read her mind better than her. She foolishly thinks he's just good at his job.

"Exactly." Emily chuckles sarcastically. "I don't even know if there's something to forgive."

"Do you really believe that?" What he listens to in her voice reminds him of the twenty-one year old girl who used to cope with cigarettes. Which he still hopes she quit, even though she swears to him that she has. He has seen her chewing gum which makes him question how much she actually used to smoke.

She doesn't know how he's acting as if he knows her so well. It rattles her. She can put up with the casual conversation, talk about his son, or childhood stories of his brother. Not with the Aaron Hotchner that understands her. Why are they even discussing her obvious mommy issues when they couldn't even form a coherent sentence when it was time to discuss the two of them? And more importantly, she doesn't understand why he makes her feel so vulnerable and at the same time so at peace. Nothing about them was peaceful, the complete opposite, they were chaos in the making. A chaos she has grown to enjoy.

I'm so fucked.

"No, I don't." Emily carefully constructs the next words in her mind. "I can't blame her for failing at something so natural, we all make mistakes, some are just more severe than others." She decides that she wants to put an end to their chaos and she hopes that he's going to catch the underlying context because if he asks her to explain herself, she won't tell him that she's getting too attached to him and it's time to run. "I hope that one day I get to do better than her."

"You will." Thankfully, he does, and she's right. Trusting so much in each other was just part of what they were already doing, the sin they were committing.

Here's the thing about emotional affairs, they happen quietly and don't require physical touch. Just like how they kept playing with the idea of them. The simple fact that there was a them was already very concerning.

"We're crossing too many lines." Aaron says starting the conversation neither of them was truly ready for.

"Yeah." It leaves her mouth sounding breathy. She can't put a name to what she's feeling. It's a mixture between relief, nerves, and sadness. No matter what they are going to say in the next ten minutes, she would be leaving this office without something. The what was also unknown to her, but she could already feel that emptiness in her chest.

He sees how unsettled she looks and decides to take the lead. It was his mess, he needed to fix this to save his family. They haven't done anything they couldn't come back from. "The worst part is that I don't know where it started." She almost wanted to say that at the hospital, but that wasn't her truth. She had no idea where the way he looked at her changed. She just knows that she likes it. "I think of you so often it's not normal and it's not right." He glances at the door quickly to make sure it was closed. He was being the kind of honest he was just with her. It crosses his mind that his main concern should be not getting caught, but he ignores it.

She feels pathetic for almost smiling at him admitting that thinking of her is not right. She almost says that she thinks of him too, but she doesn't, allowing herself to keep some of her dignity. "I know, we can't keep being vulnerable around each other, we still have time."

Do we?, both of them think.

They were basing their conversation on their psychology books. Emotional affairs have five stages: vulnerability, crossing boundaries, admission, justification, and separation. According to their expertise, they were on three, talked like they were on stage one and neither one of them would let it go to five. There was a child in the middle of this, just as they know about affairs, they know about broken families and the damage that it could do to a kid. The damage that could do to the adults involved was a whole other can of worms.

"Do you think that I'm not aware of that?" He feels the need to raise his voice, but he keeps it contained. Anyway, she shivers, leaning more into the chair, setting her arms on each armrest because she could already feel the pain from digging her fingernails into her palms."If I let my guard down with you, I could put my whole life at risk and each time is getting harder." He looks down in shame. "The more that I talk to you, the more that I think my life is not worth saving." He whispers the last part.

Emily wants to curse whoever is playing her this joke. All she wants to do is jump into his arms and beg him to never let her go. But he's putting an end to their mess. No more hugs on parking lots, no more talks about their messed up childhood, no more longing stares, no more coffee breaks and no more them. No more of the things that were helping her to cope better with this awful world. He already took cigarettes out of her life and now he was walking away leaving her empty.

And it's not like they had that many moments, the ones that mattered could be counted with one hand. However, those glimpses -small or big- of what they could be were mesmerizing. Their connection was powerful, but it was also textbook. Emotional affairs happen when the spouse feels like he found his soulmate in a third party. Aaron doesn't love her, but he knows he could. It'd be too easy to fall in love with her, but he can't. That was why they couldn't keep allowing themselves to develop a deeper friendship because it would never remain as just that. They both know it.

Emily takes a deep breath digging her nails into the chair. "So what do we do? We stop talking?" She will respect his wishes. She doesn't love him, but she has a feeling that she always will. She started to not love him in her garden. For her, love was accepting who the other person was and his words will have to be enough. So she will continue not loving him, she already got a taste of the man he truly is and that would have to be enough.

She will never ask him to give up the life he's been building for years, only because they wanted a bigger bite of something they didn't know the taste of. Except that she knows it. She knows how sour a broken family can be, how he will never be able to escape the need for one more drink. She can already imagine his little boy watching couples with their kids on the street and wondering why his family was so different. She can picture Haley never being able to trust in a man and hating what her dream life turned into. Yes, Emily knows the sour taste all too well.

"We stop talking." It hurts more than he thought it would, but it's done. They're done.

She just nods and stands up to walk to the door. When she reaches it, she inhales and exhales a couple of times ignoring the sting in her eyes. She will not cry about this. She will mourn the loss of her friend without shedding tears. She will mourn the loss of her what if with dignity.

"Emily." Her name leaves his lips before he could swallow it. Seeing her like that wasn't easy. He has to do something to alleviate the guilt.

She frowns and closes her eyes while turning her head to prepare herself. "Yes, sir?" She opens her eyes and she notices the hollow stare. Fine. The sooner she starts going back to being professional with him, the easier.

"I'm sorry." But he's not ready to make that separation just yet.

"You say that way too often, Aaron." Emily says playfully before leaving his office, closing the door as she exits.

He watches her walk to her desk and start her paperwork as if nothing happened. He pictures that from the outside, it looked like a normal work conversation. If only people knew what he just did to a woman that didn't deserve it. His training allowed him to notice every single sign she gave. He hurt her, but that happened because, for a while, he gave in to how easy it was to be him around her. He couldn't allow for more, he was not his father.

Haley was happiness for him, he was sure of that. He did the right thing. The ache in his chest would disappear in a couple of days and she would forget their interactions too.

Except that she doesn't forget as fast as he thinks.

"We hunt these people every day, the question is how different are we? Us and them?

When you have a case about two hunters and one about a guy killing homeless people in a maze, back to back, it's understandable the lack of time to think about your messed up mind. Emily takes it as a chance to focus on the thing she understands, her job. Even if she doesn't fully understand what drives a person to be so savage, she comprehends more than enough to catch them.

Until Gideon becomes the target.

"Is it wrong?" Jane asks with her characteristic tone mixed with vulnerability.

"Is what wrong?" Emily responds, keeping her work face on. She pretends the smell of nicotine mixed with Aaron's presence doesn't trigger something in her.

"Loving Frank?" The melancholy attached to those two words brings out something in Emily. She can empathize with wanting someone that you can't have. The same person is standing in that room. The unspoken limits they placed have done nothing to make the longing become less strong.

Emily struggles to find the right words that don't reveal much about herself, but with a topic like that, she needs to use her personal experience. "You don't choose who you fall in love with." Before she could even continue with an 'it's not wrong', Aaron speaks.

"Maybe you thought you could change him." Emily straightens her back even more, faking a strength that she doesn't possess. "And you did too, for a while." Jane's cigarette smoke also triggered something in him. Ironically, their positions and the smoke takes them back to a time when they knew nothing about each other and yet, they felt so at ease with one another.

At this point, they both know who their words are directed to, leaving a thoughtful JJ. The tension in the room was growing by the second. The blonde can see Emily glancing at Aaron for a brief second. She wonders if she's reading too much into it. It doesn't feel like she is. There's honesty in the atmosphere of the interrogation room that doesn't match the vibe of such a grey place. JJ has never felt something quite like it.

Emily wants to know if this is affecting him as much as her, but his face is so stern. Perhaps he faked his empathy, but he would never. The whole team knows that in order to be good at the job, you have to put parts of yourself to use. Were they using each other to get this woman in love to talk?

"Yes." Jane exaggeratedly nods.

"Until the desire to kill overwhelmed him." Aaron says more gently. Yeah, we're not talking about Jane and Frank, Emily thinks. She wonders if she's reading too much into it, but she highly doubts it. "And you saw that, didn't you, Jane?" She brings her hand to her hair, putting a loose strand behind her ear. The gesture meant to show him she's listening to exactly what he's saying. "You saw it in him." And you saw it in me, he thinks.

Emily can't wait for this interview to be over so she decides to leave their well-structured non-lovers quarrel behind and focus on the case. "Who did he try to kill?"

"Me, but he stopped himself." Jane sobs. But you stopped yourself. Emily feels weird comparing her situation to a serial killer and his mentally ill girlfriend, but everything falls into similar places. Both men tried to contain their true nature, although only Aaron succeeded. There's so much behind that word, so much that he fights every day. He's the exception, the one who hasn't allowed his desires to win and she admires him for that. In a way, she considers him to be a better person than her. He was the one that put an end to it before it meant more than a couple of smiles every day.

They allow Jane to keep talking and they finish the interview with a better notion of not only the relationship they were studying, but also theirs.

Emily bolts out of the chair to exit the room before Hotch and JJ. She almost makes it all the way to the elevator when she feels a hand around her arm pulling her into the nearest door literally throwing her against the door to close it and trap her in his arms. "Hey! What the-" She doesn't get a chance to finish because he smacks his lips into hers and all she thought she knew about him gets thrown to the window.

It's aggressive, fast and so good.

Their mouths are dancing at a rhythm they were waiting to explore. Emily feels his body covering hers and she swears she was melting. Aaron takes one of his hands to her hair enjoying the softness of it while the other is still on her arm with a grip so painfully thigh his knuckles look white, but she doesn't complain. She has her hands against his chest relishing how she has his heart in the palms of her hands.

The need for air is the thing that breaks them. Emily brings both of her hands to his cheeks and joins their foreheads mimicking his actions at that damn hospital parking lot. This time they're looking right into their eyes as they catch their breath.

They don't know who starts the second kiss, but they couldn't care less. They indulge themselves in this moment of recklessness. Everything that was stopping them is not as important as this type of connection. They're at work, and someone could see them, but the thrill makes every single touch a million times more powerful. Emily completely ignores how his ring gets tangled in her hair a couple of times, the universe always finds a way to make it noticeable, but they don't listen.

Well, Aaron does. He's not sure what made him think about the place, the case, and his family all at the same time, he blames his conscience. He breaks the kiss but does nothing with his hands. He just stares at her trying to burn the memory of Emily this flushed for him. Her beautiful lips look a little bit puffy and her eyes already look glassy. "I just tried to kill you, didn't I?" He takes his hand out of his hair and places it on her cheek. He runs his thumb over her lips.

Yes, he will keep this memory for eternity.

"I think you succeeded." Emily joins their lips for what she guessed would be the last time so she takes it slow. They will add this to their books of regrets in a few minutes, therefore she needs it to be magical for as long as it can. Once the guilt poisons the memory, there's no going back. But again, he breaks the kiss. The first one was impulsive, a build-up of a bunch of nameless feelings. The second one was lust. The third one is a goodbye. One more would be cruel, to them, to Haley and to Jack.

"It can't happen-"

"It won't happen-"

They laugh at their synchronized minds and make the moment even better. "Again." They say together as a vow.