Usual disclaimers: Wow, how I wish that these characters were mine, the show would be so freakin' awesome, but they're not, yada yada

This is my response to the Valentine's Day Challenge on CCOAC. Given the fact that it's being written for SussiRay, the Queen of Elegant PWP, I've opted not to embarrass myself by trying to cover the same territory. So, T for language.

This puppy is done!

My assigned pairing, Hotchner and Prentiss

My assigned song prompt: "Physical," Olivia Newton-John

My assigned plot prompts: candlelight dinner, single red rose, lace underwear

A Whole New Level of Pathetic

Chapter Four

Aligned So Rare

His first mistake was asking to use her bathroom. There he was, standing there doing his stuff, minding his own business, when a demon from hell drilled into his back muscles. Taken by surprise, he roared, wheeled – barely avoiding piddling on Prentiss's bathroom counter top – and saw in the mirror a furry black imp of hell clinging to him like a succubus with fangs. Before he could get his arms bent around properly to free himself, the imp clambered the rest of the way up his jacket and settled itself contentedly on his left shoulder, where it wrapped its tail around his neck and began to wash its forepaws.

"Are you all right?" Prentiss called through the door.

"You got a cat," he shouted back. "A little warning would have been nice," he added as he tucked himself in and zipped. "Scared the living shit out of me."

"Well," she replied in serene tones, "at least you're in the right room for it."

He lifted the offending animal from his shoulder – resisting the temptation to drop it into the commode – See how you like surprises, little buddy – washed his hands, and joined Prentiss in the living room.

"Ooh, turn around," she said, "I hope he didn't snag anything on that nice coat."

"Not a problem," he growled. "I'm sure the blood will cover it."

"God, Hotch," she said with a wicked smile, "didn't know you could be such a baby. Poor little Sergio, he wasn't expecting anyone with shoulders that high."

He narrowed his eyes. "He jumps on your shoulders when you're using the can, too?"

"Yes," she said. Way too much smugness in her tone. "But I don't stand up to pee."

OK, gonna be one of those nights ...

Emily prowled from room to room, checking her windows, then set not one, but two alarm systems.

"What?" he said, watching her security efforts. "The attack cat isn't enough?"

"No," she said. Voice flat. No interest in humor there.

He recalled the first few weeks after the Reaper ambushed him in his apartment, when there was nothing he could do that would completely reassure him that he was safe, that George Foyet would not somehow manage to slip into the place like smoke and torture him all over again.

"Whatever works for you," he said, quietly, supportively.

A sad little look. "Thanks. I figured maybe you'd understand." She tucked her Glock and two extra magazines – Two? She's expecting a major shootout? – into a large silver clutch purse, looked at her image, patted her hair, and said, "Ready as I'll ever be. Ooh, wait!"

She picked up the small white box he had given her. "Pin them on me?"

Feeling like a kid heading out to his first prom, he carefully attached the arrangement of three white camellias and a spray of little pink something-or-others over Emily's bosom.

"You know," she said conversationally, leaning her hip against the hall table to steady herself, "Marguerite Gauthier, the Lady of the Camellias, you know, in the Dumas novel? She wore white camellias to signal her availability–"

Oh, Christ, figures there's something to hate about these damn flowers, too ...

"–but red ones to signal the time of the month when she was … indisposed."

And, God help him, he blurted, "Jeez, I hope I got the right color."

Why don't I just pin my tongue to the roof of my mouth and go home?

She pushed him a few inches away from her by his shirtfront. "You know," she said in a low, sweet and measured tone, "if I didn't know that you're Aaron Hotchner, one of the smartest and bravest and most honorable men in the world, I would think I was going out to dinner with the Doofus of DC."

He looked at her helplessly. "It, uh, might help your evening to think 'doofus,' because I just have no idea what's going on tonight."

"Come on," she said warmly. "Let's get a change of scenery."

He bowed slightly and opened the door. She checked the readout on both of her security systems before she left the apartment.

He told himself that she had more to worry about from going out with him than she had from any nameless assailants.

He hoped that he believed it.

She took his arm, and a small thrill ran through him, part excitement, part fear.

Excitement, because nobody had taken his arm in, oh, four years, other than his mother and his mother-in-law, and then only at the church and at the funeral. Cuddling with Jack was great, but he ached for physical contact with an adult, a female adult.

Fear, because he was positive that he was emanating "needy" pheromones as steadily and obviously as a plug-in room deodorizer puts out cinnamon scent.

"So do you hate all Olivia Newton-John, or just getting physical and getting animal?" Prentiss asked.

"I don't think so," he said, then he realized that his answer sounded ambiguous. "Haley had her Best Of album, played it a lot. Some of it was OK.

"Magic," he added, although that had actually been Haley's favorite, not his own. He couldn't remember which song it was he had liked best off the album, other than it had been from Grease. And Haley had teased him that it proved what a shallow guy he was.

"'Planets aligned so rare, there's promise in the air, and I'm guiding you'," he sang softly. "I liked that."

"That's nice." She squeezed his arm and he almost thanked her.

~ o ~

Dinner passed without incident. Their Chateaubriand was done to perfection. The Amaretto cheesecake was neither too sweet nor too heavy. They talked of Bureau politics and Bureau personnel, took brief side excursions into what's-the-best-band-ever and which movie was the biggest waste of money of the past year. They drank just a little bit more wine than they probably should have, but Hotchner felt that he could get them home without disaster.

Well, all right, there was Prentiss's trip to the rest room. As she returned, eyes followed her, and the faces reflected restrained amusement rather than admiration.

Aaron rose and met her standing up. "If you would be so kind as to turn a little to your left," he murmured.

"Oh, no! Oh, tell me that I didn't–"

"You did," he whispered. "No harm done. Smile and look as though you planned it that way." He reached as delicately as he could into her white lace panties and began to withdraw the skirt of her dress.

"All of it?" she moaned softly. "Not just a little tiny tuck?"

In reply he ran his hand across her right buttock as he tugged, so she would understand exactly how exposed she had been. "Let them think you did it deliberately, to, um, titillate your friend," he said.

"Oh, shit." She glanced down and turned her ankles so she could check the bottoms of her shoes for trailed toilet tissue. "Well, clear on that one," she sighed. "What in the world must you be thinking of me?"

Hell, I'm in trouble already …

He nudged her gently. "That you're the perfect companion for the Doofus of DC?"

~ o ~

When they pulled up in front of her building in the apartment complex, she hung back. Aaron felt sure she would ask him to escort her to the door, given her security consciousness lately, but what she said was, "I really like your car, Hotch."

He blinked. "Really?" Thinking, Uh-huh. Two year old green minivan with a ding in the front right door and a permanent odor of coffee and Happy Meals. Yeah, definitely a babe magnet.

"It's grounded," she said. "It's real-people, real-lives." She seized his wrist with unexpected firmness. "You have to come upstairs with me, Hotch."

"I'd planned to," he assured her. Thinking, Real-people, real-lives, as opposed to … what, for Christ's sake?

She kept her vise-grip on his wrist the entire ride up the elevator. Some guy gave him the old, Hey, gettin' lucky, huh? look and for the briefest of instants he considered signaling for help, just in case the pressures of work had turned Emily Prentiss from a protector into a predator. It had happened. Not in the BAU. Not yet, anyway. But the law enforcement world. There could be a fine line between intense focus and full-blown psychopathy.

"Wait here," she hissed as she unlocked her door. She nudged him firmly against the wall in case he had not picked up on her meaning.

She reset her alarms, then withdrew her Glock from her purse. She bent down and picked up Sergio, then, cat in one hand, semiautomatic in the other, she proceeded to prowl through every room in her unit. Aaron understood the gut-wrenching paranoia; he had been there. He just couldn't figure out the advantage to the cat.

Finally she returned. She sighed and released Sergio and invited Aaron into the living room.

Wait: She went on a solo recon and took her cat, but left me behind? I think I should feel insulted.

"You probably wonder what this is all about," she said.

Probably," he agreed.

"Here, sit. Here on the couch." She sat down beside him.

"Hotch, there are forces out there, forces you don't know anything about. Forces you can't know anything about." She inclined her head and looked deep into his eyes. "I know, I know. You think I've snapped. But listen.

"Very soon, maybe within a few weeks, I'll be leaving the BAU. I don't know whether I'll be coming back. I don't know whether I'll – anyway, some bits and pieces of my past have come back to bite me in the ass. I have to leave to deal with this stuff. I also have to make sure that nobody tries to get to me through one of you."

Oddly enough, this discourse set his mind at ease on one aspect of her behavior. He knew that she probably wasn't crazy. He already knew that she had done things in her past that she didn't talk about."

"Emily," he said gently, "is there anything I can do?"

She looked at him with mournful eyes. "Aaron, I know you. You'd go stand between me and the gates of hell on sheer bloody principle. But you can't. This is a situation where unless you know what's going on and who the players are, you're more of a hindrance than a help. And there is no way that you'll know that. And here's the critical thing: You don't want to know. Trust me."

Her face was so sorrowful that he brushed back the unfamiliar curls off her brow and smiled. "I always suspected that your clearance was higher than mine," he said.

"You're sweet," she said, unexpectedly. Her eyes dropped and her voice became unsteady. "And there's – stuff I want to do, to – you know, because I don't know whether I'm coming back." And he would have asked her whether she meant "not coming back" as in "no returning to work" or "not going to survive," except he was dead sure what her answer would have been.

"Anything," he assured her.

"Anything?" She actually held his face in her hands and stared at him.

The challenge in her manner unsettled him, but he decided to ride with it. "Anything, Prentiss."

She bit her lip. "Are you, um, familiar with the concept of the, um, pity fuck?"

It took him a few seconds to find his voice. "Would a 'Let's do it because you are one hot woman and I'm lonely and crazy and pretty damn desperate' fuck do?"

She blinked. "Wait. So, like, I'm supposed to pity you?"

He shrugged. "It could work."

~ o ~

With the voice of sanity somewhere in his head (and maybe in hers) screaming Stupid! Stupid! they fumbled with buttons and ties and zippers, both of them stunmbling over their random pile of shoes and clothing, barely getting to her bed before they collapsed in a feral frenzy.

She was ferocious, voracious, and obsessed with hickeys, which was fine, because he didn't want a relationship; he wanted to fill the miserable spaces in his skin. And he'd been known to inflict the odd love bite himself.

They panted, moaned, and wheezed in a wordless tangle.

Until, almost an hour later, she gave a sudden harsh, animal cry muffled against his shoulder.

"Hey," he whispered, struggling up on one elbow. "did I just hear your body talk?"

She broke into breathless giggles, smacking feebly at him with open hands, groaning, "No, no, no! Don't make me laugh, don't make me laugh!"

~ o ~

He tiptoed into his house shortly before two. Jess was asleep on the couch, her latest afghan-in-progress clutched in her hands. Playing at low volume on the TV was another of those interminable crime show marathons that she insisted on watching no matter how often he explained that they were laughably unrealistic.

He hoped just to pass her by, but when the door closed, Jess opened her eyes immediately. "Oh, hi," she said sleepily. "Have a good time?" Then, "Oh, my God, looks like somebody got his ashes hauled."

And like a complete idiot he checked his fly, Why not just shout it from the frickin housetops? Make it your FaceBook status, as if you had a FaceBook account: Yo, got laid tonight. He tried to make some undifferentiated could-mean-anything noise, but Jess was having none of it. She sat straight up, and even muted the TV. "Good for you!" she squealed. "It's about time!"

Women.

He fled to the privacy of his bedroom, where he stripped and stared at himself in the mirror. Shoulders too narrow. Abs and pecs poorly defined, not to mention that uncontrollable body hair. And the scars. God, always the scars. Monuments to his helplessness. Scars hidden in thickets of chest hair, even uglier.

But then there were the new marks.

Six – no, seven. No, eight. Eight purple rings still darkening on his torso, arms, and thighs, and that was just what was visible on the front. There were more on his back, but he wasn't sure how many. Clear and present evidence that, somehow, in spite of everything, he could still drive a woman into a carnal frenzy. And however many there were on his body, he knew that he had planted an equal number on Emily Prentiss's delicious alabaster skin.

"Let's get animal," he crooned softly to himself, "animal, I want to get animal, let's get into animal ..." If he had thought for an instant that he could dance, he would have done a little boogie.

As he slipped between the sheets – buck naked for the first time since, oh, his first year of marriage, probably – he found himself grinning.

Being pathetic had its advantages.