Disclaimer: Grissom, Sara, etc. belong to Carol Mendholson. And I swear I get a physical pain in my chest just from saying that.
Author's Notes: Written for LJ's "stagesoflove"; each section is a double drabble based on the italicized prompt.
First Blush
Grissom has never believed in love at first sight. Logically, it just doesn't make sense - attraction, surely, can occur in that first glance, because humans have no control over hormones. But love...Grissom's still unsure whether he believes that it exists at all, so to say that it can suddenly appear out of nowhere seems ludicrous.
Except that nine years ago, he was knocked on his ass by a feeling that he hasn't ever found a better way to describe.
She was in the very front row of his lecture. Her fingers drummed incessantly on her notepad and she shifted back and forth in her seat, clearly uncomfortable in her stiff slacks and suit jacket. But it was her eyes that Grissom was unable to tear himself away from - wide and dark, with an intensity he was not expecting. He was affording her so much attention, in fact, that he stumbled over the introduction to his lecture. A blush rose to his cheeks, unbidden.
Sara Sidle had smiled at him, tongue poking out of the gap in between her two front teeth. And Grissom's heart had done cartwheels inside his chest.
If the evidence changes, so must the theory.
Focus
As his hearing worsens, Grissom's other senses sharpen – his sense of smell in particular. He finds himself tantalized by subtle food spices and the hint of a woman's perfume.
The consummate professional, Sara never wears anything scented to work. Grissom realizes one day that he has seen so little of her outside of the lab that he doesn't know if she has a favorite perfume. It strikes him as odd considering how much time he spends with Catherine, the scent of Promises sometimes mingling with Lindsay's Lucky You.
She would wear something light, he decides. Warm, passionate, but with a hint of something darker. No flowers for his Sara - vanilla and orange, maybe, with an undercurrent of clove.
The shells around them have been cracking, fissuring...one hesitant step forward finds Grissom curled against her couch watching movies when neither of them can sleep.
She doesn't wear perfume at all, he discovers. She smells clean and fresh - soap, toothpaste, mint. When the weather gets colder, he sees her slathering lotion on her hands, and when leaning towards her, finds that she smells vaguely of cake batter. He breathes in deep, and knows there's no artificially-created scent quite as sweet.
Layers
Despite everything, Grissom thinks he really is a hopeless romantic.
He'll admit to having fantasies about Sara Sidle - denial, at this point, would be almost laughable. They range from mundane to provocative, but always coated with a thick layer of naiveté. He pictures their first kiss as something sweet - gentle, tentative, and altogether unexpected.
It's unexpected, but not gentle at all. A casual "discussion" morphs into an all-out screaming match, and the venom in her words shocks him. He knows he deserves most of them, but he can't help being a bit disappointed that they seem to have flavored her mouth with a sour tang that stabs his tongue when he finds her lips slammed against his own.
He can't say who kissed who, but it's hot and hard and good. Grissom finds that the sour taste dissolves quite quickly into something sugary and addicting, and he finally lets himself admit that they should have done this a long time ago, before that layer of sourness had time to build up in the first place.
He tries to explain this all to Catherine, who pats his shoulder fondly.
"If there's no bitterness, you can't fully appreciate the sweetness."
Tactile
Grissom's very hesitant about touching her - particularly in the lab. He insists that they spend as little time together as possible at work, for fear that someone discovers their secret. Sara wants to tell him how ridiculous the idea is; they spend so little time out of work that avoiding each other during the day means they barely see each other at all. Their co-workers, meanwhile, would most likely be ecstatic.
But Grissom is adamant, so she goes along with it for awhile.
Catherine strides into the break room one morning with a coffee in her hand and a smile on her face.
"How long?" Sara rolls her eyes.
"Who told you?" The other woman chuckles.
"Please. You don't eat with him, you don't talk to him - he barely looks at you. So either you're fighting, or you're under some deluded idea that you can fool the rest of us into thinking you aren't together. And since I've seen you two fight far too often, my vote is for the second option."
Sara lets out a loud grunt of frustration before bolting from the break room, headed directly for Grissom's office, leaving a still-smirking Catherine in her wake.
White Noise
Grissom is used to silence. His mother was extremely self-conscious about speaking out loud, relying solely on signing. In college, he paid extra to have a dorm room to himself, knowing that it would be impossible to find a roommate who would put up with his obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
Since then, he has only lived alone. The solitary lifestyle may seem strange to some, but to him it's comforting. He's had a few girlfriends, and each one seemed more like a hassle than a pleasure. He doesn't like his space invaded, his things misplaced, his quiet interrupted.
Jumping into a relationship with Sara after so many failures scares him. He thought that surely she would be the same. But yet again, he was wrong. He falls asleep to her snoring, wakes to her singing (badly) in his shower. She stays at his place almost every night of the week, muttering curses when she stumbles into things on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And when she spends the occasional night back at her own apartment, for the first time Grissom hears the loneliness that the silence has to offer.
He smiles and reaches for his phone.