He almost pinched himself to prove that he wasn't dreaming again. To be sure she was really here on his boat, in his arms, in his life.
But this was no dream. Even in his wildest fantasies he was never able to actually conjure her up in the flesh.
He breathed deeply, inhaling her scent. For the first time, he appreciated the tiny bed in his boat because it meant they had to cuddle closely to keep from falling out of it.
He'd missed cuddling with her. It was his favorite thing to do after making love.
Careful not to wake her, he shifted onto his side so he could slide both arms completely around her, and hold her that much closer.
It was because of her that he was out here in the first place, in the middle of nowhere. It was her love for animals and nature that had inspired him to take up this quest to help preserve the marine life.
He'd traded insects for oceans. If that wasn't a declaration of his love for her, he didn't know what was.
But Sara Sidle was not a mind-reader — this he knew all too well.
She needed actual words in order to know what he was thinking or feeling...what he wanted, hoped, feared.
He'd never been good with words. Not out loud, anyway. And especially not with her.
A change was long overdue.
It hadn't been a lack of love that had driven them to divorce — it had been a lack of communication combined with stubborn stupidity on both sides.
This was already his third chance with her — if he screwed this one up, it wasn't likely that a fourth chance would ever come around.
Having her back made him the luckiest man in the world.
And considering their track record...he was afraid of what might happen if he didn't start letting her know that he knew it.
She stretched, her sleep fading as a circle of warm light poured into the cabin through a porthole above the bed.
Instinctively her hand reached toward the other half of the narrow bed, seeking the source of the warmth that had cocooned her all night.
But all she found on his half of the bed was an empty glass beer bottle.
She picked it up, confused. Neither of them had consumed any alcohol last night.
Wait — it wasn't exactly empty.
She tipped the bottle upside down, and a rolled-up note slid out.
Huh. A message in a bottle.
It was absurdly appropriate, she supposed — they were at sea, after all.
She unrolled the note, immediately recognizing the crisp cursive of his precise hand.
"My biggest regret in life is the time we wasted being apart."
She read it five times, stunned that he would think to tell her how he felt without her having to drag it out of him.
So few words, yet so great their meaning.
He was making an effort. That warmed her even more than the words themselves.
She'd come back to him purely because she still loved him. Because she hurt every day to live without him.
She had no intention of trying to change him anymore. He was who he was...and who he was, was who she loved.
And to love him was to accept him exactly the way he was...exasperating quirks and all.
Standing at the helm of his boat, he smiled as a pair of arms snaked around him from behind.
He turned to greet her properly, with a kiss and an echo of her bid to a good morning.
It was a good morning, because her face beside him was the first thing he'd seen when he woke.
He wanted every day of the rest of his life to begin like that. And every night, for the rest of his life, to end like last night had.
Neither one of them made mention of his message in a bottle.
So when he spotted that same bottle on his deck later on with a piece of paper rolled up inside, he assumed at first that she had rejected it. That she was giving it back to him in protest and some attempt to force him to say the words to her out loud instead.
And then he realized the scrap of paper inside was not the same one he'd put in.
When he'd penned the note, he hadn't expected any kind of reply. Curious, he retrieved this new one and uncurled it.
"Not a single day goes by that my heart is not with you."
He inhaled a deep, cleansing breath as he read it a second time, a third time.
She wasn't rejecting his efforts after all. On the contrary, she was accepting — she was encouraging — what he could give, in the amount that he could give it, at the pace that he was comfortable with.
She'd thought the message in the bottle was a one-time thing. A whimsical fluke never to be repeated.
She was wrong.
She watched him as he slept beside her again, her mind replaying the newest set of words she'd found in that bottle of his.
"To lose you is to lose everything."
She'd had no idea that he felt that way about her.
Up until now, she'd thought that what mattered the most to him was his career, his life's work — past, present, and future.
It floored her to learn otherwise.
She'd been afraid that he would feel suffocated living in such close quarters with her on his small boat.
But maybe that's what made it work? It was just the two of them, and nobody else for miles.
She put her fingertips lightly into the greyed curls at his temple, traced the line of his short beard across his jaw.
His cheek twitched and he murmured her name, but he remained asleep as far as she could tell.
She laid her ear against his steady heartbeat, stretching her arm to rest across his chest.
One of his hands moved to cover hers, and he pressed a sleepy kiss into her hair.
"Wherever you are, that's where I belong."
Her penned words brought a smile to his face. He appreciated her reply, and he valued even more her words.
He re-rolled the little piece of paper and slipped it into his pocket for safekeeping.
While she folded herself into his tiny shower, he stood before the countertop in the minuscule galley with a pen and a fresh scrap of paper.
The irony was not lost on him. He was trying not to bottle up his emotions anymore, and yet here he was putting his feelings literally into a bottle.
It was perhaps the hardest thing he'd ever done, taking his deep personal thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears and translating them into words...but he did it, and he did it for her.
The easy part was writing it on a scrap of paper and leaving it in a bottle somewhere on the boat for her to find.
To hand to her the bottle or the message directly would take all of the fun and the mystery out of it.
This way, it was like a treasure hunt, because he didn't always leave it in plain sight.
But he did make sure to always leave it in a place where she would find it eventually.
Once, he left it under her pillow. Another time, in her messenger bag. And twice, in one of her shoes. (It wasn't redundant — they were two separate shoes, after all.)
And she never once complained that he wasn't saying those words out loud.
So he continued his subtle method of delivery day after day, week after week.
And she even played along.
For every note that he wrote her, she gave him another in return.
They could keep this up for years, with enough paper.
"You're my compass, my sail, and my anchor."
Poetic, and a little cryptic. She really wanted to ask him to clarify it, but she restrained herself.
The thing was, these little scraps of paper had never actually been acknowledged verbally by either of them.
Somehow it seemed much more intimate that way. Like a secret within a secret.
They were exchanged at random without schedule or structure...the only consistency being that he always wrote her at least one note every day.
Once in a while, if he was feeling particularly capable, he wrote two in the same day.
When she first realized that he intended to keep this up — this 'message in a bottle' — she'd been a little afraid that he would try to use them as a substitute for real, everyday conversation.
But they still talked in 'real life' about as much now as they ever did before. Maybe even more.
They certainly made love a lot more than before.
With a secret smile, she penned a new reply.
"The only thing better than sleeping with you, is waking up with you."
Since she'd come back to him, he'd had fewer bad dreams, fewer moments spent in his head rehashing past regrets, and fewer instances of saying or doing the wrong thing yet again.
He watched her from behind mirrored sunglasses as she controlled the boat under his instruction and guidance.
Satisfied that she could handle it without him, he stole a kiss before ducking back inside the cabin.
Grabbing two waters from the galley fridge, he paused long enough to pen a new sentiment and leave it in the glass bottle conspicuously on the countertop.
That was where she found it an hour later, after he claimed to have forgotten something and sent her down to locate it for him.
"You keep my demons at bay."
She could have written to him those exact same words, she had to admit.
Finding a pen and a new scrap of paper, she scribed some words to him that she'd never really been brave enough to speak aloud herself.
"My heart still skips a beat whenever I see you look at me."
For the life of him, he didn't know why she would feel that way.
He was nobody special. He was just...himself.
After all this time, he still hadn't quite figured out what had even attracted her to him in the first place.
Whatever the hell it was, he was eternally grateful for it.
He took his time simplifying the phrase of his next tribute to her, not wanting its meaning to be lost in too many unnecessary words.
"Your loyalty astounds me."
It was one of her qualities that he admired the most — her loyalty to friends, to colleagues, to him.
He dropped the scroll into the bottle just as a new idea hit him, and he reached for a second scrap of paper.
"Your patience inspires me."
And a third.
"Your forgiveness staggers me."
He dumped the first scroll back out of the bottle. Stacking the three notes together, he rolled the trio tightly and poked the whole thing into the bottle.
She'd never pulled three messages from the bottle at the same time before.
Even when she got two in the same day, they were still spaced out from each other by most of the hours on the clock.
She almost didn't get these out of the bottle — she'd had to search a galley drawer for something long and skinny to stick down in the bottle to coax out the roll that had loosened and was now too wide for the bottle's narrow neck.
But a wooden chopstick did the trick and soon she was unrolling triple the messages than usual.
These latest three were added to her growing collection of tiny scrolls, kept safely in a box where they wouldn't get scattered or damaged.
These were his love letters to her, and she treasured them more than anything else she'd ever owned.
Barely a handful of words on each one, but the fact that they existed at all meant even more to her than their contents.
In a week, she had ten of them. After a month, thirty-seven.
Thirty-seven microscopic bits of insight into how this man truly felt about her deep within himself.
She learned more in one month than she had in years.
Who could have ever guessed that Gil Grissom would finally learn how to communicate?
"You keep me sane."
"You keep me grounded."
"You make me soar."
He committed these three new truths from her to his memory before putting the papers safely away with the others.
She hadn't repeated the mistake he'd made of accidentally getting a trio of rolled notes stuck in the bottle.
She'd wisely left the tiny scrolled bundle peeking a few millimeters above the rim where he could easily retrieve them without the help of any chopsticks.
When he'd first begun this attempt at wooing her, he'd worried that too soon he would run out of things to tell her, that their relationship would regress again, and it would be no one's fault but his.
But somehow, the more he wrote, the easier it became.
Regrettably, he could have saved both of them so much heartache if only he'd done this sooner.
It was only fitting that she would join him in his preservation work. She was, after all, the reason that he now did what he did.
He'd missed working alongside her. He'd missed her tenacity, her drive, her passion.
She was the best partner he'd ever had, no matter the task at hand.
As always, they both felt a little salty and smelled a little fishy from the long day's work...yet she didn't seem to mind because she slipped her arms comfortably around his middle as they stood close together on a weathered wooden pier gazing out at the glorious sunset.
But beautiful as the sunset was, it just couldn't compare to the woman at his side.
He pulled her snugly into his arms, and he kissed her soundly.
He had a new message to give her. But this time he wouldn't wait until he had an empty bottle and a scrap of paper handy.
For seventy-two days, he had hidden his awkwardness and shyness and self-consciousness behind silly little props in a desperate bid to pour out his heart and soul to her once and for all.
He needed no such props anymore. Besides, she knew him inside and out — he had no secrets to keep from her anyway.
Everything he felt from the time they first met up until this very moment, he summed up aloud in a few short words.
"Every day, I fall in love with you all over again."
And he got a lump in his throat when she replied.
"I love you to the ends of the earth, and back."
EPILOGUE
She nearly cried the day the message-bottle broke.
It hadn't been used in more than a year, but what it symbolized meant a lot to her and so she kept it in a place of honor on their boat.
It had played such a special role in rekindling their relationship, and now it lay in pieces on the hard galley floor because she'd accidentally knocked it off a shelf.
He swept up the mess and discarded the poor broken bottle into the trash, assuring her that they didn't need it anymore because he had something else far better.
From a low cupboard in the galley he pulled an old, clean, two-gallon glass jar that he'd picked up somewhere along the way and hadn't yet found a use for.
Into the jar's mouth he inserted a carefully rolled-up eight-by-ten document that they'd acquired on their most recent jaunt ashore.
The document uncurled itself inside the open space, propped up at the back of the jar, a proud display of their new marriage certificate.
She followed, curious, as he carried the jar into their bedroom and chose a good spot for it where it would be safe from accidents.
From one drawer under the bed he brought out his entire stash of rolled-up, formerly-bottled messages — every single reply that he'd received from her, minus the very best one which he liked to keep with a photo of her in his wallet.
Gently he dropped the little scrolls into the jar and gave it a slight shake to distribute them evenly in front of the certificate.
It looked lovely, but something was still missing.
She opened the cupboard over the bed and took down her own box of messages from him.
All one-hundred-and-nine of them.
She sifted them in with his, mingling them all together, bringing the jar's contents to a grand total of two-hundred-and-seventeen tangible little reminders of their love.