the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?
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could you pleaseee do more hotch x bombshell reader
cw suggestive —you and Hotch have a shared secret you’re hiding from the rest of the team. fem, 1k
“He’s too old for you, you know.”
You give Elle a charmed smile. “He is not.”
“Is too.”
“How old do you think I am, Greenaway?” you tease. “I know I look good for my age, but I’m fully developed. He is not too old for me.”
“Who?” Spencer asks, placing down his dinner tray with a smile.
“Gideon,” you say. “What do you think, babe, do I have a chance with our great leader?”
“No,” Spencer says, giggling as he spears a dehydrated looking green bean with his fork. He’s getting good at recognising jokes for what they are.
As the younger (but, despite Elle’s insistence, not young) crowd, you have complimentary avoiding of work to do, free with your employment. You spend your lunch hour trying to stretch it into two, driving Gideon insane, and prompting Hotch to come and find you. He hasn’t appeared yet, but when you check your watch you’ve got about ten minutes left until you need to get back.
“The line was so long,” Spencer says. “They could reduce the foot traffic in here by half if they had two people working the register.”
“Maybe if we had our own offices we could eat our lunch alone from a brown paper bag like everybody else does, and we wouldn’t need to line up,” Elle says wryly.
“You don’t like lining up like middle schoolers?” you ask in feigned shock.
“I don’t,” Spencer says earnestly.
“She’s being sarcastic,” Elle says. “You couldn’t tell?” She looks over your shoulder suddenly, but there’s a velvet voice in your ear before you can turn around.
“Can I borrow you?”
You smile because he can’t see it. “That depends, Agent Hotchner, will I get to finish my lunch?”
You don’t have a tray in front of you. It clearly doesn’t matter to Hotch. “I’ll take care of it.”
You’d let him drag you around by the collar, but that’s none of his business. You turn to meet his eyes over your shoulder, disappointed that he’s already a few steps back waiting for you to stand up.
What Elle doesn’t get, what nobody seems to see but you, is that Hotch had no need to lean in and talk so close to your ear. He could have sent you an email, paged you, and he’s here in the cafeteria waiting for you to follow him out.
You send both Elle and Spencer a suggestive look and climb off of the bench. Hotch senses when you’re near rather than looking, starting out of the cafeteria and down the hall to the elevator bank. He does a sharp turn you aren’t expecting to the photocopying rooms, where you refuse to go, lest you get killed by a falling stack of printer paper. One minute you’re walking together and the next he’s taken your hand and pulling you into an alcove, suddenly sliding his hand behind your back.
“Aaron–”
He dips his face down and kisses you. It’s surprising and not, one slight nipping kiss before he looks you in the eyes. He’s asking if you’re alright to be kissed, and if it’s him, he can shove you up against a wall —you lift your head and he pulls you right back up to be kissed again. His hands slide over the tight fabric of your blazer and hold you chest to chest, his nose crushing yours, his lips unwavering. Pinpricks of heat ricochet from your mouth to your neck, a shudder he feels that has him laughing hot against your lips.
“That’s not very gentlemanly,” you say, weaving your fingers into the soft crop of hair behind his ears.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He lifts his hand, cleaning the smudge of your lipstick with his pinky finger, before stroking your cheek with his knuckle. “What sort of note was that, this afternoon? Why do you think that’s alright to leave at my desk?”
“How’d you know it was me?” you ask, dropping your hands from his hair to poke at his waist.
“I hoped it was you,” he admits. He looks like he might say something else, but he steals a rough kiss instead, and then another.
“Okay,” you say, pleased to be kissed like this by him, “it was me. And you deserved it.”
“Did I?” He takes your face into two hands. “Did I?”
You stutter momentarily at his repeated question. “You– yeah, Hotchner, you did. It was supposed to be nice, like a promise.”
“Are you promising?” he asks, giving your cheek a sweet, gentle stroke with his thumb.
You kiss his nice jaw, ruffle the hair that curls over his forehead playfully, and laugh as he catches your hand. He doesn’t grab. Hotch isn’t ever aggressive with you (though he can get a little excited).
“Decide what you want for dinner tonight, and we’ll go after work,” he says, returning your hand gently to your side.
“Another kiss?” you ask.
Hotch kisses you sweetly. “Come on, honey, lunch is over.”
“Just one more?” you ask.
He falls for it every time. You must harvest half a dozen extra kisses, incensed because it’s him, because nobody thought for a minute he’d bend to your whims.
Hotch doesn’t bend. He just wants you like you want him.
“One more,” he says as you pull away. “Just one.”
It tickles your lips. You curl your arms behind his neck and try to make it one that’ll linger, your fingers scratching lightly at his scalp as he presses your back to the cold wall. You yelp a laugh and he covers your back with big hands, mumbling a sorry that gets completely lost.
You don’t know how he’s going to explain this to Gideon.
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