Rom-com Gone Wrong (Hotch x Reader)// ✔

5. It's a Breeze

Summary:

Hotch finally asks for your consultation on a case and your dynamic seems to change to another degree.

Notes:

yet another chapter 😝 bcs i have no structure lmao

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The long-awaited email comes a week or so after. With the flurry of new cases, which start becoming a lot since Tommy makes it a habit to ask for your consultancy. Apart from the self-study and leaving your laptop open, just in case and only to make sure a new email doesn't go remiss, nothing much occupies your life but work. And an occasional text exchange with Doctor Reid, who you'd started texting after Matt left. Those consisted of only ratings and reviews of physics magic – as he insisted on calling them.

The Magnus Effect, you text Dr. Reid, where does that one rate?

8 out of 10, he replies shortly after, the levitation trick from Bernoulli's principle takes lead.

You roll your eyes, and it's stupid that the first thought is that he should be talking to your brother instead. The trick Dr. Reid mentions is the one your brother used to do often in high school. He'd take a cylindrical duct tape and make the object float, only because the surrounding air was higher pressure than the fast air moving around it.

Your laptop notification sounds at night, and you're like Pavlov's dog, conditioned to leave everything and plant yourself in the makeshift home office in your kitchen, to read the new email.

Dear Detective Tommy,

I am emailing you from Columbus, Ohio, where a case of a serial killer has relocated us to. The unsub (singular, as of our latest deduction) is specifically targeting tourists in the state, but we have yet to find out from which sites they are taking the victims. Is there a list of particular locations only a native would know, but that are not extremely popular or easily discoverable through touristic websites?

I thank you in advance,

Hotch

That same rush of feelings as last time comes up. He's asking you. He has a genius, a hacker and a whole police department in Ohio at your disposal, and yet he remembered such a detail.Technically, your brain seems to remind you, he's asking Tommy. At least, it's somebody who is a native, and you've never been more grateful than now to have something in common with the other man. Most importantly, you know the answer.

You write quickly:

Dear Hotch,

Surely there are plenty of unpopular, weird things in Ohio that can attract visitors. There's the World's Largest Basket in Newark, and The Great Serpent Mound in Peebles. Other unusual attractions include Cornhenge in Dublin and Hartman's Rock Garden in Springfield. At the top of my head, there's even Ghost Town, in Findlay, and even Dogwood Pass in Beaver, which is an exact replica of an old west town. If it's limited only to Columbus: The Book Loft in the German Village neighborhood, though it is somewhat famous, is always open late and it is not widespread news.

You stop and consider. If this were Tommy then maybe it would be correct to ask him as well, just to help Hotch the best you can. He picks up at the second ring.

"Jerry, you got bored already with no work?" Loud noise drifts in the speaker with his voice, that of people chatting and glasses clinking together, and you know he's out at a bar, or club. Or wherever young male detectives like him go after a day's work.