Disclaimer: I don't own any part of Criminal Minds or the characters…

Summary: On a plane trip home, some or all of the team share embarrassing stories about themselves… Written for the July Week 4 Open Character Prompt by hot4booth…

"Love is trembling happiness." -Khalil Gibran

*~OoO~*

Excruciating Anecdotes

The medium sized jet swerved slightly through the somewhat windy skies, dodging some eye blinding clouds and still managing to keep it and the passengers steady and comfortable. Inside the jet, six people were seated around a small center table, talking in soft, calming voices. The case they had just finished had been tough, and it hadn't turned out the way they had wanted it to. As FBI agents, they aimed to mend lives and help others. Some people referred to them as lifesavers, rescuers or heroes, but they considered themselves to be none of those. They aimed to help and didn't want any rewards for it.

One of the six, a brunette haired woman, was laughing with a young man with dark blonde hair. Another woman, a blonde, was chatting quietly with a dark haired, older man with a goatee, and the other two, a raven haired, stern looking man and a dark skinned bald man, were also talking together, trying to pass time until they all returned back to their hometowns in Quantico, Virginia.

"Hey, are any of you feeling bored at the moment?" the brunette asked, glancing around the jet to catch the gazes of her other five team members.

"Now, Emily, there are tons of things that you and I can do to pass the time together" Derek Morgan told his partner, taking in her non amused expression and smirking at her expense.

Emily rolled her eyes. "Oh Derek. Why must you always be the pervert of us all?" She saw Morgan smirk again at her. Shaking her head at him, she could hear the rest of the team chuckling at the banter between the two friends.

"Actually" Reid began. "The human mind is never permanently stimulated long enough so that that the individual can occupy themselves for a certain length of time that is past the amount of –".

Reid was interrupted by an elbow to the stomach by Morgan. "Cool it, man" Morgan muttered, focusing his attention to Emily, who was talking to the rest of his friends.

"Oh, yeah. I know what we can all do to pass this boring time. We can share stories". She glanced at her team members, looking for something that was even somewhat close to a response from them.

"Prentiss, what are you, twelve?" Hotch asked, adjusting his perfect deep blue tie and pulling his black suit jacket tighter to his body. He peered at the agent who was giving him a teasing grin.

"Come on, Hotch. This is going to be really fun" Emily whined, giving her boss her puppy dog eyed look and pouty lower lip. "You need to have some fun for a change instead of being so uptight".

Hotch rolled his eyes. "Fine. What kinds of stories do you want to share, Prentiss?"

"I know!" Morgan announced. "We share some embarrassing stories about really awkward moments in our lives". The group turned quiet. Even Emily had gone silent and she was now biting her lower lip nervously.

"Come on, you chickens" Morgan continued. "This is going to be really fun. We can all have a good laugh and move on. I mean come on, these things already happened. We can look back and laugh at them now. What's so scary about that?"

JJ broke the silence between her colleagues. "I'll join" she announced, seeing the surprised looks on all of her friend's faces. "What? Just because you guys don't want to join, I can't?"

"Fine, I'll join too" Emily muttered, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at Morgan. "But if this backfires, it's all on you" she told Morgan, who grinned at her.

"Why not?" Dave commented. "I'll be in this too. How bad can it possibly be? Come on, Aaron. You're going to be joining in with this too, so cut the tense bull crap".

Hotch was slightly taken aback by his friend's words, but finally agreed to join as well. Morgan had pushed Reid into joining in too. "So who goes first?" he asked, looking around at the other silent agents.

"Emily, since this was your idea to tell stories, why don't you go then?" Morgan announced, rolling his eyes when none of them said anything in response to his question. Crossing his arms at the stubborn agents, he began his story.

"What, me?" Emily sputtered, her face twisting into an expression of surprise and slight shock. Even though she had been the one to suggest the activity, she hadn't wanted to be the first one to share her story.

Morgan nodded. "Go ahead. You said that this was going to be fun, so go ahead and start entertaining us. We're waiting". Emily noticed that all of the other members of the team were smirking at her astonishment. So holding her head up and taking a deep breath, she began her story.

"So this one time when I was about nine years old, I had just moved to Rome with my parents because of my mother's crazy job relocations and I didn't know the area really well. So when we went to this really fancy clothing store, my mother had helped me pick out some clothes and we went to the dressing room so that I could try the outfits on, but then when I exited the dressing room, I couldn't find my mother and I started to panic. When I saw her shoes under the door of one of the dressing rooms, I started to bang on the door, calling my mother's name, but it wasn't her who exited the room of the door I had been banging on; the stranger, this woman, just had the same shoes as my mother. I had to apologize to her. It was so embarrassing. I found my mother a minute later. I felt like the world's biggest moron."

Morgan burst out laughing while JJ was holding back her laughter with a struggled smirk and even Hotch was smirking slightly at the story.

"It wasn't funny!" Emily cried, making all of them burst out into laughter.

"I'm sorry, Em" JJ said between bursts of laughter. "But that is extremely funny". Emily's scowl and Hotch-like glare soon stopped the laughter of her colleagues almost immediately. "Okay so who's next?" Emily asked the team. Before anyone could continue, however, Emily's cell phone rang loudly.

"Hey Garcia" Emily exclaimed, putting her Droid on speaker phone so that her friends could hear the tech girl's conversation.

"Hiya Gumdrop. Whatcha doing?"

"We're sharing embarrassing stories" Emily answered. "Do you have any that you would like to share, Garcia?" The team heard the other end of the phone line grow strangely quiet.

"Well, I have a few, but I'm going to go with the least embarrassing story, yet both of the stories that I have are pretty embarrassing for me". Garcia answered.

"Well it was about five years ago when Em, here, had resigned from the BAU, despite my pleading with her to stay and Hotch had been asking for a transfer. Well when Strauss had called me in my office, I really had no idea that she had been on the case. When I said "talk dirty to me", I meant it to Morgan, not her".

Everyone on the team burst out laughing immediately, Morgan laughing the hardest. JJ was trying to control her laughter while Hotch, Emily, Dave and even Reid were laughing hysterically.

"That's my Babygirl" Morgan announced while wiping the tears of laughter from the corners of his eyes. "I remember that. It was hilarious"

"So help me god, Derek Morgan. If you are as much as cracking a smile at my expense, you will never see the light of day ever again" Garcia cried, making the grin on Morgan's face disappear a little.

"Okay, so who's turn is it?" Morgan asked. "Reid, you're up".

Reid gulped nervously. "Uh well… This one time, I was at this supermarket and I was buying groceries. The uh cashier was a really pretty blonde who kept flirting with me and well I kind of liked her. Well, you know how I have a hard time talking to girls, right? Yeah, so I wanted a quick excuse to leave, but I was really tongue tied. So instead of saying "Oh look, its six o'clock", I accidently said "Oh look, I got to run. Its sex o'clock".

Emily was the first person to laugh loudly, her steady laugh filling the jet. A couple of seconds later, the rest of the team began to join in with the teasing. Reid frowned and scowled at his fellow teammates in embarrassment, his cheeks turning a bright shade of red.

Morgan then began his story. "I was playing flag football with my eighth grade gym class and when one of the girl's went to pull my flag off while I was running, she accidently grabbed my pants and pulled them down along with the flag".

The team was still in laughter when Morgan spoke again.

"Rossi, you're next" Morgan managed to get out between the loud laughing of his teammates. They could hear Garcia's laughter from her office over the phone.

Dave sighed. "About seven years ago, wife number two and I decide to go on a little retreat to a hotel in Vegas and well, you know how it gets in Vegas. We got back to our hotel room at about three in the morning; of course we had drunk too much. Well, things got kind of heated once we got behind a locked door and I guess we got a little too loud because we heard a knock on the door and the manager was there. He was asking if we could keep it down a little because he was getting some complaints from other guests who were trying to sleep among the noise".

Dave saw the entire team smirking at each other, Garcia speaking first over the phone. "Mr. Rossi, I never would have thought you had such a wild side to you".

Dave rolled his eyes, leaning over to capture Emily's phone so that he could hang up on Garcia, but Emily pulled her phone away from his reach. Sighing in disgust, Dave looked at JJ. "Jen, your turn".

JJ looked like she wanted to be anywhere else but where she was now, but she knew that it was only fair that she went, being that everyone else had. "Okay, so Will and I were practically on our first date at the movies. We had gone to see The Exorcist and I was kind of scared. So whenever I got scared, I would grab Will's hand for support, but during this really scary part, I reached for his hand, but I reached down too far and uh…well…you know".

JJ was blushing about a million shades of red, Emily was in a full blown laughing fit and Morgan was barely breathing between his never ending laughter. "I'm sure Will didn't mind, though". Emily cried, while grinning.

JJ was clearly embarrassed. "Hotch, your go" she proclaimed, seeing that Hotch had barely said a word during her story. She just wanted to do anything to get the attention directed away from her.

Hotch took a deep breath before beginning. "As hard as it is to believe, Haley and I used to relieve some much needed tension in the mornings before class in high school. I'm sure that you know what I mean. Anyway, we were "anti-stressing" in the teacher's supply closet before class one day when our math teacher went to get something from the closet and caught us in there. Thank god that Sean, my brother, was dating that teacher because we ended up with a week of detention instead of a week-long suspension".

JJ was laughing hard enough to break the windows of the plane, Emily was bending over in laughter and the rest of the team was in hysterics at the story that the stoical unit chief had told them.

"I never would have guessed, sir" Emily giggled, still not stopping, even when Hotch shot her his best glare. "You think that a scary glare is going to stop my laughter?" she asked.

"No" Hotch answered. "But I know what will". He leaned forward and planted a quick kiss to her mouth, stunning the brunette, along with the rest of the team, into silence at the unexpected gesture. He saw Emily lick her lips, savoring his taste.

"Okay, what did I miss this time?" Garcia asked over the phone. "Why is everyone all quiet?"

Before anyone could reply or speak, the flight attendant appeared in the doorway of the jet, "Agents? We've landed".

While the team was exiting the jet, Emily leaned over to whisper in Hotch's ear. "Aaron? I think you just made our relationship obvious" she clipped. Hotch, smirked, planting a kiss to Emily's parted, tasty lips, feeling her tongue dart between his own, open mouth.

"Well I think I just made it more obvious" Hotch replied, seeing the team staring at them with astonished expressions on their faces.

*~OoO~*

"Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop." -H. L. Mencken

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