Teaching jj

Chapter 33

Hey guys I know it's been a while but I'm back and here are a couple new chapters. After this I'm going to ending the book and maybe starting a sequel anyways enjoy.
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After about twenty minutes of JJ restlessly tossing and turning in her arms, Emily kissed her shoulder and observed, "Can't sleep?"

"I just keep thinking about those women," JJ responded, her voice breaking. "About how we should be doing more for them than ... than this."

This. Spending hours making love in the private - or not-so-private, depending on the presence of those surveillance cameras -safely-contained bubble of their bedroom. Clearly, JJ was finally starting to actively accept her role as a profiler in their undercover assignment.

"What else can we do, baby?" Emily inquired in a neutral tone, testing her. "We're not cops. We don't even have gun permits. What can we possibly do for these women we don't even know?"

"We can get to know them," JJ said, turning her body toward Emily's. "We can let them know that they're not alone, that we're all in this together. We can refuse to give into the fear we felt at the bookstore earlier and live the kind of life we said we wanted when we left New York. That's what we can do."

Emily smiled proudly. "Remember our first night here, when you asked me to teach you how to be brave?"

JJ nodded.

"I knew you didn't need me to teach you that. You're one of the bravest people I've ever known," Emily said in a serious voice, her brown eyes fixed, unblinking, on JJ's blue ones. "I knew you just needed some time to understand that the right decision is almost never the most convenient one."

JJ sat up abruptly, not saying a word, and began to search for her clothing, strewn around the room. Watching her, Emily felt her heart sink and had to actively fight the tears brimming in her eyes. When she'd added the part about making the 'right' decision versus the 'most convenient' one, she hadn't been talking about this case at all - and it didn't take a profiler to know that.

Still, even though Emily didn't - couldn't - expect JJ to simply leave Will, to leave her established life as a wife and a mother once this case was over and they'd returned to DC, she also couldn't prevent herself from wondering if JJ had ever seriously considered it. Had she ever bothered to take just one second to realize that when she promised to let Emily hold her every night for the rest of her life, believing that Emily was asleep and couldn't hear her, JJ had already proven that she knew, that deep down in her heart she knew, the 'right' thing to do?

Emily immediately banished those thoughts from her mind. This wasn't couples' therapy; this was a case. And it was long past time for Alexandra Brewster and Vivian Cook to start working it.

While in town, they made a point of holding hands, snuggling against one another as they browsed in store windows, and kissing affectionately as they held mundane conversations about television shows, books, and pop culture scandals.

They'd come to expect the disgusted looks, the muttering of "fucking dykes" by passersby, and the mothers furiously marching past them while shielding their children's eyes - but they were both truly stunned by the sheer number of people who approached them, introducing themselves and welcoming them into the community, asking questions about how they'd decided to move from "the city" to their local town.

By the time JJ and Emily had reached the end of the main street, the sun had already set and they were both exhausted. So many phone numbers to save in their cell phones, so many invites to tomorrow night's Kitty Corner, so many disclosures about their invented personal lives while listening to each couple excitedly share their own stories about how they'd arrived in this small town in Michigan and could never reconsider moving back to a big city, not even with the recent murders. So many women blurring together, none of whom stood out as clear targets - although, of course, the team had never been able to precisely identify anything but the most obvious aspects of victimology: sexual orientation, relationship status, and relative newness to the area. And yet none of these women were new to the area; in fact, most of them had lived here long before the murders had started.