good question… kind, emotionally mature, and someone I can laugh with about absolutely everything. I’d love a person I can talk to for hours without it ever feeling forced, and who doesn’t judge my fanfiction or Emily Prentiss addiction 🤭
it would also be really nice to have some things in common, like music or hobbies, but I’m also very open to discovering completely new things together
word count: 3.5 k
Summary: You come to spend a quiet weekend away from college with your best friend’s family, expecting nothing more than familiar faces and easy conversation. Instead, you meet Emily Prentiss. Your best friend’s godmother and BAU Unit Chief, composed, intelligent, and impossible not to notice. What starts as polite distance slowly shifts into something harder to define, especially when silence begins to feel louder than words. And by the time she leaves, you are left wondering whether you will ever see her again or why that question suddenly matters so much.
A/N: You can find the first two parts here.
tags: college!reader, fem!reader, emily prentiss unit chief, soft longing, age gap, late night thoughts, quiet tension, things left unsaid, unspoken connection
Masterlist • Taglist• Age gap masterlist • AO3
Sleep, unfortunately, remains just as elusive as before.
Every time you drift even a little bit, something pulls you back. Dinner. The sound of her voice when she laughed at something you said. The way she looked at you when she wasn’t speaking. And then, worse than all of it, the brief contact at the table that you keep telling yourself was nothing and somehow still cannot file away as nothing.
Lying awake in the darkness, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the house around you, you attempt several increasingly ridiculous strategies to stop thinking about Emily Prentiss.
The memory should not carry this much weight. It certainly should not feel significant. You are an adult and attraction happens. Attractive women exist. You have survived them before. But Emily is different.
You turn onto your side. Then onto your back again. At some point you stop pretending you are trying to sleep at all. You throw back the blankets, pull on a sweatshirt and quietly leave the room before you can spend another hour arguing with yourself.
The floor is cold beneath your bare feet as you move through the sleeping house, careful to keep your footsteps quiet. The wooden floor softens each step, muffling the sound of your movements until you come to a stop at the top of the staircase. Maybe a little fresh air will help. Maybe it will be enough to quiet thoughts that refuse to settle. You make your way downstairs and glance around, the darkness of the house unfolding slowly before you.
The hallway is dim, shaped by moonlight that cuts through the windows in long pale strips. The kitchen light is off, and the only sound is the hum of the refrigerator. By the time you step onto the back porch, the cool night air feels like a relief.
Fog hangs low among the trees beyond the yard, blurring their outlines against the darkness, and the scent of damp earth lingers beneath the promise of rain. For a few moments you simply stand there with your hands wrapped around the railing, letting the cold bite at your skin. The quiet feels different outside, broader somehow. Large enough to hold thoughts that had seemed overwhelming upstairs.
You are just beginning to feel your mind settle when the door behind you opens. A soft creak, the quiet turn of a handle. It could be anyone. And yet your mind has already supplied the answer. The fact that you're right makes it worse.
Emily steps onto the porch carrying a yellow mug between both hands, the small light above you catching briefly in the silver threaded through her dark hair before she eases the door shut behind her. When she looks up, her attention settles on you. Surprise flickers briefly across her face before something gentler takes its place.
“So I wasn’t imagining that someone slipped outside after all,” Emily says softly, her voice steady, almost casual, though her gaze lingers on you just a fraction longer than the words themselves would require.
“Was I too loud?” you ask a beat later, brow faintly furrowed as you glance back toward the house.
“The third step from the top creaks.” A trace of amusement touches her voice. “Judy always said she could hear Claire sneaking out because of it.”
Her fingers tighten slightly around the mug. “Now I can confirm it.”
You laugh. “I can believe that.”
The smile that slowly spreads across her face nearly takes your breath away. It is different from the smiles she wore at dinner or in the kitchen. Back then, they rarely lingered. She would smile and, moments later, retreat behind those carefully guarded walls again.
But this smile? This one stays and nests itself somewhere deep in your stomach. It should not be anything special, and yet it changes everything between you. There is a tension in the air now. An attraction so obvious, so impossible to miss, that you cannot imagine making it up. At least, you hope you aren’t.
There is something different about her like this, standing beneath the porch light. Younger, perhaps. Or simply lighter, as though something in her has loosened just enough to let itself be seen. She moves to the railing beside you, close enough that you can feel the shift of air when she passes. She is not touching you, leaving enough space to be polite and somehow not nearly enough space to feel distant.
Your entire body tingles with the awareness of her. Heat gathers beneath your skin, spreading slowly through your chest and shoulders until it feels almost impossible to tell where your own warmth ends and hers begins.
You catch the faint scent of laundry detergent, green tea, and the floral trace of her perfume. It is softer now than it had been at dinner, faded by the passing hours. You don't know why, but that only makes it worse. Familiarity has already begun rooting itself where it has no right to be.
The silence that settles afterward should feel awkward, but it doesn’t. Instead, it feels strangely natural. As though the two of you have done this before. As though standing side by side in comfortable silence is something familiar rather than something entirely new.
There is no pressure to fill the quiet. No urgency to keep conversation moving. Just the steady presence of another person and the unexpected comfort of sharing the same stillness.
The two of you stand side by side, staring out across the yard while fog drifts slowly between the trees. You know the stars are hidden somewhere behind the clouds, and a small part of you aches for them.
Back home, the city swallows most of the night sky. Streetlights and buildings wash everything out until only the brightest stars survive. You have always loved stargazing, always found something comforting in looking up and realizing how small your worries are compared to everything else.
Somewhere in the distance you can hear the call of an an owl. The sound stretches thin through the darkness before fading again, leaving the night untouched behind it.
And still your attention keeps drifting back to the woman beside you. You find yourself noticing the shape of her profile against the darkness. The way her fingers rest around the mug. The rise and fall of her breathing. Small, meaningless details that somehow refuse to feel meaningless at all.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
Her voice is quiet, soft enough to blend into the darkness around you, and for a moment it feels less like a question and more like an invitation to say what has been keeping you awake.
You smile faintly to yourself, tip your head back toward the cloud-covered sky, and shake your head. “Apparently not.”
The answer earns a small nod from Emily, and something about the gesture catches your attention. Not because it is remarkable in itself, but because it carries none of the politeness people often fall back on in conversations with near strangers. There is no surprised laugh, no reassuring comment about jet lag or unfamiliar beds. Just simple understanding, as though sleeplessness is a language she knows fluently enough not to require explanation.
And somehow that feels more intimate than sympathy ever could. Emily doesn’t ask you to explain yourself. She doesn’t offer solutions. She simply accepts the answer for what it is, as though she understands exactly what it means to lie awake with a mind that refuses to quiet down.
Claire has mentioned it before, of course. The sleepless nights. The impossible work schedule. Over the years, stories about Emily have accumulated, woven into late-night conversations, shared meals, and the endless small moments that make up a friendship. You know about the travel schedules that never seem to make sense, the phone calls answered at impossible hours, the tendency to disappear into work for days at a time.
You know enough to understand that sleep and Emily Prentiss have never been especially reliable companions.
The porch light doesn’t quite reach where she’s standing, leaving part of her face softened by shadow, but it does little to hide the exhaustion that lingers beneath her composure. She is good at hiding it. Claire has told you that often enough over the years. Good at functioning when most people would have stopped long ago, good at adjusting her posture, her expression, even her voice until nobody thinks to ask whether she is tired. It is a kind of discipline you have never fully understood, the ability to keep moving simply because stopping has never really been an option.
But standing here now, you can see the cracks in it. The faint shadows beneath her eyes. The way her fingers tighten around the mug every now and then, as though she is holding on to the warmth without realizing it. Small things. The sort of details most people would never notice. The sort of details that suddenly feel impossible to ignore.
“You couldn’t sleep either?” you finally ask.
A soft exhale leaves her as she keeps her gaze fixed on the cloud-covered sky.
The answer comes as nothing more than the slightest nod. You wait for something else. An explanation. A joke. Anything. None of it comes.
Emily keeps her eyes on the cloud-covered sky, her fingers curled around the mug, and for reasons you can’t quite explain, that feels far more revealing than words would have.
The longer you watch her, the more aware you become of how little she actually gives away. Not because she seems distant. If anything, she feels closer out here than she has all evening. But there are parts of her that never quite reach the surface, thoughts that seem to linger somewhere behind her eyes before she decides whether to let them go.
The tension in her jaw catches your attention. The careful neutrality of her expression. Whatever keeps her awake tonight, she carries it quietly.
“Nightmares?” The question slippes out before you can stop it.
For a second you regret asking. Regret follows almost instantly, not because of her reaction, but because of the word itself. It feels wrong the moment it leaves your mouth, heavier than you intended, carrying a weight neither of you had acknowledged until now. You barely know her. Whatever keeps Emily Prentiss awake at night belongs on the other side of a boundary you have no right to cross, and as the silence stretches between you, your whole body seems to tense in anticipation of having crossed it anyway.
You expect her to deflect. To laugh softly and change the subject. To pretend she does not know what you mean.
Instead, she turns toward you. The answer is there before she even speaks. Not in her expression. Not in anything obvious. Just in the simple fact that she considers the question rather than avoiding it. Something in your chest loosens and tightens at the same time.
“Sometimes. But not today,” she whispers, her voice carrying a softness that feels almost startling against everything you know about her.
The answer lingers between you, not because of what she admits, but because she admits it at all. She could have let the question pass unanswered. Could have hidden behind a joke or a polite deflection. Instead, she meets it head-on and hands you a truth so small it should hardly matter, yet somehow it feels like far more than that.
You find yourself looking back toward the trees, tracing their blurred outlines through the fog while your mind remains hopelessly occupied with the woman standing beside you.
Claire has spent years talking about Emily’s work with a mixture of admiration and concern, proud of her in the way only family can be while simultaneously wishing she carried a little less of the world on her shoulders. You remember stories about cases that lasted months, about flights taken at a moment’s notice, about serial killers and crime scenes and the endless darkness that seems to follow people in Emily’s line of work.
You wonder what happens to all of it afterward. Whether it stays neatly contained inside reports and evidence boxes, or whether some of it follows her home anyway, settling into your dreams and refusing to leave. The mere thought of her having nightmares, of all that darkness catching up to her in the night, makes nausea rise in you. You would want to take it from her, and you know even as you think it that the idea is ridiculous. How would you possibly take something like that from her? You barely know her…
Maybe that is what shifts something in you without fully forming into a decision. Not a plan, not even a thought you can properly name, just a faint instinct to pull the conversation away from anything that might make her look even more distant than she already does out here in the dark. “Claire adores you.”
Her reaction is priceless. The smile that appears feels different from the ones you’ve seen throughout the evening. It softens something in her expression, reaching her eyes before she can stop it, and for a moment you catch a glimpse of the woman Claire has spent five years describing. Not the Unit Chief. Not the profiler. Not the woman who chases monsters across the country. Just Emily.
“I adore her too.” The answer comes without hesitation, without thought. As instinctive as breathing.
And suddenly you understand something that has always been difficult to put into words whenever Claire talks about her. It isn’t admiration that lives beneath all those stories. At least not entirely. It’s trust. The kind that forms slowly over years and survives every disappointment life throws at it. The certainty that no matter how chaotic things become, Emily will show up when it matters.
“I figured.” You fold your hands and let them hang loosely over the railing of the terrace.
A quiet laugh escapes her. “God, she was impossible as a kid.”
The affection threaded through the complaint undercuts any attempt at seriousness, and you find yourself smiling before she finishes.
“When she was six, she informed me that I was moving into her treehouse.”
The image appears in your mind with startling clarity. Claire, six years old, stubborn enough to challenge gravity if it inconvenienced her. Emily, younger but undoubtedly just as composed, being ordered into a treehouse as though negotiations had already concluded.
“Informed?”
Emily glances toward you, one eyebrow lifting. “I wasn’t consulted.”
The deadpan delivery earns a reaction from you that slips out before you can stop it: a short, unguarded laugh that surprises even yourself, and for a moment the years separating the story from the present seem to vanish entirely.
“I spent three hours up there discussing my new living arrangement.”
“Three hours?” you ask, disbelief breaking through your voice.
“She refused to come down until I agreed, and it was already late, Judy was worried sick.”
You shake your head, still laughing.
“That is the most Claire thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It really is.”
The conversation drifts naturally from there, winding through stories and memories until it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins. Sometimes Emily talks. Sometimes you do. Occasionally one of you falls quiet while the other follows the movement of the night life around the house as it continues without needing either of you to participate in it. The pauses never feel awkward, only inhabited, as if silence itself has taken on shape between you.
The ease of it catches you off guard. You’ve known Emily for less than a day. By every reasonable standard, this should feel different. More cautious. More formal. Yet standing here somehow feels simpler than conversations you’ve had with people you’ve known for years.
The realization is dangerous enough that you look away from her. Unfortunately, looking away solves absolutely nothing.
You remain acutely aware of her presence beside you. Of the low cadence of her voice whenever she speaks. Of the warmth that still seems to linger in your memory from that brief accidental touch at dinner. The recollection resurfaces with irritating ease, dragging your thoughts directly back to the bread basket, to Emily’s hesitation, to the impossible possibility that she might have felt something too. Or to the moment earlier, when she had, almost instinctively, used your presence as an anchor without even seeming to notice it herself.
You exhale sharply through your nose.
Beside you, Emily’s mouth curves. “You look like you’re losing an argument.”
A faint, involuntary lift of your shoulders betrays you before you can stop it, something between disbelief and reluctant amusement moving through you at the same time. Of course she notices. The embarrassing part isn’t that she’s observant, it’s that she always seems to be observant in your direction first, as if you were easier to read than you have any right to be.
“Maybe I am.”
She studies you for a second. “Are you winning?”
The question sounds harmless, but you know it isn’t. Not when your mind supplies the actual argument. Not when you already know the answer.
“No.”
Emily laughs quietly, and the sound settles somewhere warm beneath your skin.
Emily laughs quietly, and the sound settles somewhere warm beneath your skin.
The ease between you returns so naturally that it feels less like something being restored and more like slipping back into a rhythm neither of you had realized you were already following. At some point, without a clear beginning to it, you notice she keeps looking at you. Not constantly. Not openly. Just often enough that every time your eyes meet, something in you sharpens, as if the world briefly adjusts its focus.
It stops being about attraction as an idea and starts becoming something harder to ignore in real time. And the unsettling part is not what you feel, but the slow suspicion that she might be moving through the same awareness.
The thought arrives fully formed and still makes no sense. Emily is older. Claire’s godmother. Someone you have known for less than a day. None of it fits, none of it should carry weight, and yet it does in a way you cannot fully interrupt. And still, when your eyes meet again, neither of you looks away.
Your attention catches on small, involuntary details before you can stop it. The way her throat moves when she swallows. The brief touch of her tongue against her lips. The blue of her sweater sitting softer in the low light than it should feel reasonable to notice, the fabric falling in a way that makes everything feel too immediate to be ignored. And then, just as uninvited, you register her attention on you the same way. Her eyes settle on your hands, linger there a fraction too long, then lift again, as if she is also aware of the exact moment she is looking too closely.
The moment holds without asking anything of either of you, but it also does not give either of you anywhere to retreat into. Just awareness, sustained and uncomfortably mutual.
Emily is the first to look away. Later, she glances back toward the house, and when she speaks again, her voice has shifted into something more grounded, as if she is stepping back into a version of herself that is easier to manage.
“You should probably try sleeping again.”
You hear her exhale softly and can’t help the faint smile that follows. “There it is.”
One eyebrow lifts. “What?”
“The part where you’re trying to get rid of me again.”
Her laugh is warm enough to make the joke worthwhile. “I’m not getting rid of you.” The denial would be more convincing if her eyes weren’t smiling too. Then her gaze flicks briefly over your sweatshirt before returning to your face. “It’s cold.”
You glance down at her words. The sweatshirt is thick enough to survive a small apocalypse, and judging by the faint amusement lingering around Emily’s mouth, she knows that just as well as you do. Neither of you points it out. There is no need to.
And still, it doesn’t land the way it’s meant to.
A moment later she pushes away from the railing and turns toward the door. You think that’s where it ends, the conversation, the closeness, everything settling back into distance. But when she moves past you, it doesn’t feel like distance at all. She’s closer than she should be. Close enough that your awareness sharpens, as if the air between you changes before either of you does.
She lifts her hand, and for a moment there’s a pause in her, something that doesn’t fully resolve into movement. Before she can rethink it, her fingers brush your upper arm, then stay there just long enough that it stops feeling accidental. A second contact follows at your shoulder, lighter, but no less deliberate.
It is a touch so controlled it almost passes for nothing at all, and yet it lands with more intention than either of you acknowledge. It’s gone again before you can hold onto it but your skin still remembers it.
Something tightens in her expression, small, restrained, but seconds later contained again, as if she has already decided she shouldn’t have done it and is forcing herself not to show it. Then she lets go.
“Goodnight, Y/N.”
The sound of your name in her voice sends a shiver through you before you even register it, and for a second you forget to breathe, as though any movement might break whatever this is between you.
“Goodnight, Emily.”
The door closes quietly behind her, leaving you alone with the fog, the darkness, and thoughts that have become infinitely more complicated than they were an hour ago. You had come out here to clear your head, not to get pulled deeper into something that already feels harder to untangle than it should.
Long after she disappears inside, you remain at the railing staring into the night, trying very hard not to think about her. But that doesn’t really work, because she is already everywhere in your thoughts, settled in places you can’t quite push her out of anymore.
wow ‘the shape of almost’ makes me feel things 😩😩 pls keep updating, we love you!!
wow! I’m really glad you’re enjoying it :) !!
and thank you for saying that. I’ve been a bit unsure about this series.. but maybe it’s also just me being a bit overly critical of my own work at the moment and not feeling too satisfied with everything in general.
