Title: For Now: For Always

Author: Jeanine (jeanine@iol.ie)

Rating: PG

Pairing: Sara/Warrick

Spoilers: None

Feedback: Makes my day

Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.

Archive: At my site Checkmate () , Fanfiction.net; anywhere else, please ask.

Summary: Warrick watches Sara from across the room

Notes: Part of the "For Now" universe, a companion piece to "Forever". Previous instalments "Leaving" "Staying" "Homecoming" and "Surprised" are at my site. Ria, please take this to mean that great minds think alike!

***

For years, he made his living observing people, watching them closely, sometimes near to them, sometimes from across a room. He knows how to observe the nuances of human behaviour, how to read body language, and he's good at it.

It's a skill that served him well when he left his job as a CSI, took a job as a professional musician. The other guys in the band learned early to follow his lead when it came to reading a room, selecting just the right song on the playlist to have the audience eating out of his hand. He can't count how many nights he sat up on some bandstand, fingers moving over the ivory keys of the piano, eyes looking down into the crowd, seeing strangers' smiling faces looking up at him, seeing two bodies moving together in perfect harmony. The smiling faces were always nice to see, the couples more bittersweet, reminding him of the way a certain friend of his had danced with him at his leaving party, a certain friend who he was beginning to think of as more than just a friend.

Once, he sat up on the bandstand in a small club in San Francisco, and that friend was one of the smiling faces who were looking up at him. He can still see her now, gap toothed grin never faltering, hair loose around her shoulders, little black dress displaying more cleavage, more leg than he'd ever seen from her, and he remembers being thankful that he knew those songs by heart, could have played them blindfolded. Looking at sheet music or piano keys was not going to happen when he had a view like that to distract him. Especially not when the rest of the band took a break, leaving him on his own on the stage, and it was just him and his piano playing her favourite song, "The Way You Look Tonight." He'd scarcely taken his eyes off her as he'd played, had been sure he could see tears in her eyes, but when he'd talked to her later, seen her still smiling, he'd convinced himself it had been just a trick of the light.

What hadn't been a trick of the light were the hordes of men who asked her to dance.

Or how she'd turned every single one of them down.

He sits now on another bandstand, and there are smiling faces looking up at him. But these aren't strangers' faces; these are the faces of his friends, his family, and she is among them.

She is once more smiling up at him, but there are no men asking her to dance. There are once more tears in her eyes, and he knows that this is no trick of the light, that the usually unemotional Sara Sidle is actually moved by something, by him. Her dress is not black, but ivory, longer, though still showing quite a bit of cleavage.

She has never looked more lovely.

He is once more playing her favourite song, "The Way You Look Tonight," and he runs the lyrics through his head as he plays, and he means every note.

For now, he doesn't sing, nor does she dance.

Both these things will come later tonight when he sings the lyrics softly into her ear as they dance in their bedroom, his fingers moving not over the ivory of the piano keys, but the ivory of her dress, of her skin.

For now, they are in a room full of people, but they might as well be the only two people here, and he knows he's never going to lose this feeling. Because it's not just for now, it's for always.