Thanks to CSINut214 for the beta. And belatedly… to mingsmommy for catching some things.
It really hit her when she realized that she slept just fine without him in the bed beside her.
She slept just as she slept for the first thirty or so years of her life: fitfully sometimes, heavily others but in a sort of pattern that she'd come to know as certain. When she'd become accustomed to sleeping in Grissom's bed, her sleeping patterns conformed to the new location and carried her away to dreams and nightmares of varying degrees.
His departure didn't disrupt her pattern in the least. Sara didn't wake up when he turned over, didn't give over to the seductive slide of his palm over her hip.
The evening of his departure, she didn't bother getting up with him, though she was awake. Eyes remaining shut, she listened to his purposeful stride as he shuffled about the room, rolling suitcases out into the hall before slipping back inside to take one last shower. Sara rolled onto her back then and wondered how silence and quiet would redefine themselves once he was gone.
After musing on it for a few, long minutes, she realized that she didn't care that much, spared the door to the master bath one last look, and slipped back to sleep. She dreamt of being a poet and using complex euphemisms and run-on alliteration and words larger than Grissom could ever fathom in order to call him an asshole.
When she awoke, she was alone in his home and pressed the hair back out of her eyes, sinking into his bedding for a second. Everything smelled of him and she rolled her eyes for noticing such a thing. With tenacity, her body sprung from the bed as she went hastily about gathering the few belongs that had made their way into his home. She had to take care to fit them all into her shoulder bag and she left the townhouse without a backward glance.
One truth she had learned as soon as they'd come to describe what they'd entered into as a romantic relationship, was that happiness was a very flexible term. Most times, they were simply content to be, not really happy although technically not sad. The scale was generally tipping towards the better though it teetered towards the bad more than a few times.
Once inside her car, Sara berated herself for even thinking about poetry; she couldn't even string together a coherent simile in her head. Scales and balance; he'd knocked her off kilter the moment she'd met him. Poetry, there was no need for poetry. Plus, it was just easier to call him an asshole straight-forward.
It was a difficult thing, to balance her worry for Grissom as well as be rightly indignant about how he'd chosen to go about his sabbatical. It was a statement of fact when he'd told her, secure in his decision, not bothering to even attempt to lace concern for her into his voice. The only outward sign that she gave of her discomfort and disappointed anger was the way in which her fingers curled into the armrest of the sofa. "What?" she asked, feigning confusion though she'd heard every word he'd spoken, loud and clear. "I'm sorry, I just... you should do what you need to do," Sara reasoned, not believing a word that came out of her mouth.
And the Academy Award goes to Sara Sidle. Straight-faced and stiff-backed she relieved herself from the position on the couch and managed to serve him a tight smile. "I'm going to bed," there was no lump to swallow accumulating in her throat but there was something burning her eyes, causing them to tear up. After a brief sniffle and a splash of cold water over her face, she was preparing to deal with the bombshell he had lobbed her.
Her pajamas felt tight against her chest, the cotton uncomfortable against her skin but she shucked off the sensation and with resolve, slid herself into the bed; it felt colder than it usually did.
"You asleep?" he'd asked when he'd made his way into the bedroom, hanging his large body against the doorframe.
Sara made no move to speak; there was the lump, rising in her throat. She might as well have been writing her acceptance speech, she was pulling off being uninterested so incredibly well.
When he slid into bed next to her, his cold hand brushing the hair off the neck as to give him a naked plane to kiss, Sara squeezed her eyes tightly shut and did her best to remain still. Who knew if that would be the last time she'd allow him to touch her…
His chapped lips remained longer than normal. When he whispered into her hair that he loved her for the very first time, the shuddered breath that threatened to escape remained trapped in her chest.
The orchestra had to play her off.
In the locker room, she'd been so tempted to slam the metal door shut and brush brusquely past him, leaving him without the satisfaction of a goodbye. She did one better, didn't wish him well, leave him a smile, just left it all up in the air. The twisting in her gut left her half-satisfied and half-nauseated. Sara didn't like revenge, didn't like to twist the knife just to see the pain, but the satisfaction of the look on his face was palpable.
And then he left, just left. She didn't care where he was going or that he had a reason or could rationalize it… he just… left.
Sara continued to sleep unobstructed; there were no dreams of him to plague her REM cycle, and yet there were no nightmares either. There was nothing when she slept, a plethora of nothing that left her off-balance when she awoke.
It was rather disconcerting, how much she managed to miss him and yet wish he stayed away forever at the very same time.
The first seven times that the LCD screen on her phone lit with his name, she had ignored the call, allowed it to go to voicemail and proceeded to delete the message without listening to it. Thinking herself a horrible person, Sara spent the rest of the week re-learning how to cook for one. Dinner for one, wine for three; Sara lied to herself and pretended that the half-empty (and it was half-empty, certainly not half-full) bottle was a result of a particularly hard shift, not because she imagined she was forgetting was his stubbly cheek felt like.
And still, it wasn't about need. Sara had learned to live without the biological imperatives a long time ago. She'd never really need anything again. Certainly she didn't need love or sex or companionship; she wasn't in need of his lips or his heart or his voice. But she wanted so fiercely that it made her insides burn, made her body restless.
The eighth time he called he didn't mention the seven previous, just told her about his experience with snow and students until she told him that she was getting tired and that it was late and hung up. Even though the phone was disconnected, she allowed her fingers to remain curled around it, wishing that she'd said this instead of that, told him just how fucking pissed she was instead of retiring to her aloof stance.
He'd been gone two weeks and she'd only spoken to him four times, the grand total of their conversational time being just under a half an hour. It seemed that neither had much to say. The one photograph that she had the two of them together-a cheesy, impulse photograph that they'd purchased from an over-eager clown while exiting a crime scene at Circus Circus-was in a frame, now tucked into the back of her sweater drawer. Sara couldn't stand to look at it without wanting to punch it or possibly burn the picture itself.
It was raining the night that she opened her apartment door for a messenger holding a package in her name.
Tempted to shut the door in the teen's face, she weighed her options: return to sender or accept the gift. If she did accept, she could choose to ignore it or accept it for what it was worth. After sighing a heavy sigh she sent the boy on his way, and tore the brown paper off of the parcel to reveal a heavy book.
Rolling her eyes, she turned it over in her hand. The coarse covering of the book suggested something other than leather. Sara nearly threw the book on the sofa and headed out, but her curiosity got the better of her and she flipped the heavy cover open. Of course there was an inscription, what else had she expected?
'Sara
Know that I think about everything that I have left, every day.
Perhaps re-reading this will help you understand what I'm feeling.
-Gil'
It was so simple that she actually laughed, and on a whim, began flipping through the aged book, coming across dried petals of flowers as she did so. A few fluttered out to the floor and instead of picking them up with ample care and placing them back from whence they came, she crushed them under the heavy sole of her boot.
Holding the book tightly in her hands, she considered it, looked down at the page, read words such as 'it' and 'the' and then shut it audibly, moving to place it carelessly on a shelf.
But that was the book that had started it all she supposed and instead of placing it on her ample bookshelf, she slid it beneath the sofa. With any luck she'd forget about it until she did a spring clean.
He called her again, two days later and she actually told him that she hoped he might not come back. After that, she'd hung up and walked the Strip as an anonymous tourist for nearly three hours before calling Greg and asking him to pick her up.
"I miss Grissom," he'd said casually, "But Keppler's not so, so bad... I guess…"
Looking out the window as the casinos warped into colorful blurs, she admitted something she never thought she would, "Not, guess not." Nothing about missing her former boss, and the absence of such a statement had Greg glancing at her in interest. Sara didn't bother meeting his eyes, and he just kept driving for awhile.
Three weeks gone by and he called twice more and once she happened to admit that she missed him, but he said nothing to her sentiment, just breathed from his end of the line and waited for her to say something else. After two good, solid minutes of nothing but breathing and the occasional, faint crackle, he mentioned, "I'll be home next week."
Biting her lip to keep a malicious comment in, she slid up onto the counter in her kitchen and stared into the living room, noticing the edge of the book peeking out from beneath the sofa. Shit. "Yeah, when do you get in? I'll probably be at the lab."
Sara could nearly feel his surprise from the other side of the country. "I'm uh, I planned on taking a cab."
"Okay," she breathed abruptly and hopped down. "Well, I'll see you next Thursday then."
"Yeah," he sighed, there was a faint clicking and she thought he might have hung up. About to press the 'end' button, she heard an abrupt, desperate-sounding 'I love you,' and she paused over the button and clamped her eyes shut hard.
"I'll see you in a week," Sara said with certainty and hung up, placing the phone back in its cradle with care. She'd see him in a week and she'd decide then if she could forgive something that she wasn't even sure that she understood.