A seven year old Sara Sidle smiled and pulled a pencil out of her backpack. Today they were working on capital cursive letters and she had been practicing her z's for hours the night previous.
Making a tiny loop near the top line of her paper, she swooped the pencil down and around and curled the little tail in around itself. She sat back and grinned at the literary sensation she had created: a solid line of capital z's, neat and in a row.
Mrs. Topitzer walked by and told her she had done a good job and placed a gold star in the top right hand corner of her paper. It was slightly skewed, leaning on its side and while Sara did appreciate the gesture behind the tiny glittering adhesive, she couldn't help but carefully peel it away from the paper and reposition it.
Again she sat back and smiled.
Next to her, Jason Wright sat, tongue poking out of the side of his mouth, concentrating on his paper. Sara watched as his eyes went to the board, squinted and then looked back down at his paper. "Sarry," he finally said, "I can't make a z."
She tilted her head to the side and examined his paper. He sure couldn't make a z, that was for sure. He also bit his pencil and hadn't erased the vestiges of bad letters previous. Her face screwed up a bit in disgust. "You make really good ones. Can you show me how to make good ones?"
"Well... okay," she reasoned, leaning over in the uncomfortable desk. "But only if you pick me for kickball at recess."
"'Kay."
And while Sara helped Jason perfect the little tails on his z's, she somehow developed her first crush.
---
Twelve year old Gil Grissom kissed his first girl. He hadn't been shy about it at all; neither had she. It had been a sweet thing, born of a dare. To begin with, he was scared; he didn't know how to kiss a girl, where to put his hands, what to do afterwards.
But when Jane Myers leaned into his lips, a sweet rush coursed up through his body and he pressed his mouth to hers. They laughed about it after and neither of them knew that three years later they would be making out under the bleachers as the Tigers won their first Super Bowl in twenty years.
When Jane moved to Indiana, a fifteen year old Gil swore off girls and instead took on the unsteady world of science. There were lots of test tubes and late nights at school mixing things and reading books filled with obscure facts that none of his classmates had ever heard about.
His tan faded over time and he went from the summer kid, the one who hung out down at the lake with all the other kids to the one boy in class that no one really wanted to be around.
Indiana... what was in Indiana anyway?
---
She loved crushes, loved the sweet rush of flutterbys in her stomach when she saw that one particular boy that she really liked.
Sometime around sixth grade she'd stopped scrawling their names at the top of her notes (just too, too untidy) and instead took to watching them silently during class. After little Jason Wright she'd never really talked again to a crush again.
He'd broken her heart, shoving her down near the swings, calling her a 'dweeb' sometime in the fourth grade.
For a day, she'd sworn off boys forever, that is, until Jim Rinaldi held open the door of the cafeteria for her... and smiled. Jim lasted until December and then there was Kevin, Steve, Kevin again and Eddie. Pages and pages of white paper with little hearts and 'Sara Rinaldi's' and 'Sara Nashat's' and 'Sara Clifford's'.
In high school, while pretending to have her nose buried in a book she'd glance over at Tyler Linchester. He was on the chess team and the hockey team and he was the smartest boy in her class. Sara liked him very much and they even studied together some but he was dating a girl in the grade below her, a girl with blonde hair and green eyes.
The tragic thing was that she, Heather Golden, was very nice and very sweet and though she was popular, Sara couldn't find a reason to dislike her. But though she knew she couldn't actually have Tyler, she could still look at him and daydream her way through boring English lit.
And that's exactly what she did.
At the end of the year her final grade was a flat B and Tyler and Heather were still together.
---
'Gil, boys your age are dating,' his mother both spoke and signed to him.
With a sigh, he looked up from his plate of spaghetti. "I know, mom," And he went back to pushing his dinner around on his plate. Judith hid a smile from him, or tried to, but when he looked up at her, it was still there. "What?"
'Nothing, nothing,' she too pushed the pasta around on her plate. 'I'm just saying, that Morton girl used to come over here all the time.'
'Mom, she doesn't like me,' he signed instead of spoke. Sometimes his hands could relate more accurately how he was feeling. 'I just helped her with math.' It was Friday night and while he didn't really want to prove his mother correct, but he was sick of staying in and reading his life away.
Judy chewed a bit of her food and then regarded her son over the rim of her wine glass. 'What do you like to do?'
Gil dropped his fork on his plate and winced at the clank that resounded in the kitchen. "What?"
"What do you like to do," she said in that monotonous way he'd come to accept.
'I like to read mom and write and... and I like to make models.' His hand movements were slow and his eyes fell to his lap.
'And what would you tell the girls you like to do?'
He thought about that for a moment and then signed, very smugly. 'I'd tell them that I like to take long walks mom,' and though his mothers face lit up a bit at that, he followed his statement up with, 'That I love to take long walks off of very, very short piers.'
And with that he got up from the dinner table.
After his mother had gone to bed he came back downstairs and had done the dishes in the dark, reminding himself that the capital of Indiana was Indianapolis and that it was only two thousand miles and change away.
---
The first time she saw Gil Grissom she had wanted to pull out a purple pen and scrawl the double g's all over her notepad. Perhaps she would have if the paper would have held any ink. It was too wet for her to take notes on and she almost began to write on her arm.
It was interesting stuff.
Sara focused her attention on the scribbles he made across the blackboard and committed the little doodle to memory. Flutterbys started their flutter and her eyes went wide when she connected the dots and was reminded of Tyler and Jason and skinned knees and broken hearts.
Her skin chilled as the water evaporated and it was replaced with a lovely sort of heat that would stay with her until the end of her days.
---
The first time he saw Sara Sidle, he was pissed off. Not only had she shown up to his lecture nearly twenty minutes late, she had caused a commotion entering the lecture hall. Her book bag had smacked into the door and all two hundred eyes that had previously been focused on him whipped around to seek out the cause of the commotion.
As she collected her books and muttered a flat, "sorry," he noticed her appearance. The suede coat she wore was a dark, blood red, though he was sure it looked much better its regular color. She was soaked through with rain, most of her books ruined, hair plastered to her forehead.
She had no shame clomping down a few flights to take a seat at the front of the auditorium, slucking off her ruined outwear. Producing a soggy notepad from the depths of her equally as soggy bag, she sniffled a bit, wiped her nose with the back of her hand and looked up to him, still pissed off... but her eyes were shining.
Later on, she offered him the same hand with which she had wiped her nose. When she realized her faux pas, she'd blushed and offered up the other.
---
The bay reeked of death and day old fish and it tangled in her hair and clothing until she felt positively sickened by the sea. He could still smell her, the slight tang of tangerine, something citrus still hanging about her curves, lingering away from the touch of the salty air.
"Dr. G," she called from the shoreline, a piece of seaweed clinging to her boot. "Take a look at this."
She'd called him Gil at his insistence but her coworkers had stuck with Dr. G and she didn't want to be conspicuous. He, of course, took his time getting over to where she was standing. Once he reached her, he toyed with the focus on the camera hanging around his neck.
Just a few pictures... if he could just steal a few pictures of her...
"These boot impressions, they're coming away from the water, not to the water," she was blissfully unaware of his attentive gaze, not on the impression but on the curve of her shoulder. Grissom followed the line all the way up her neck to her ear before she caught on. "G?"
"So, the perp, or victim, came from a vessel of some kind."
"A boat," she said easily, smiling.
But he shook his head. "A vessel of any kind Sara, let's not get too specific. These things are never certain." And as an afterthought he added, "These things are always in flux."
When they closed the case, he informed her that he was heading back to LA and then to Vegas. For a second he reflected on the fact that the distance between Vegas and San Francisco was much closer than Marina Del Ray and Indianapolis and then laughed at himself for such a strange, strange thought.
Her first letter came to him a week after he had settled in and he read it over, paying close attention to her diction.
Promptly, he wrote back, telling her of the garish lights and the crime rate and of mundane facts about insects and how he slept during the days now.
Her return letter contained some silly pun about vampires and he laughed for a good few seconds before taking in the rest of her words.
Letters came and were sent every week or so and Grissom began paying close attention to how beautifully she wrote her z's.
---
She ambled into the sparsely lit auditorium and was reminded of prom, lingering against the wall, turning down offers for dances. She remembered flitting about, talking with friends, drinking unspiked punch and just fading as the school year finally ran out.
Old classmates came and hugged and she hugged back and they talked of marriages and careers and children but mostly of the 'remember when's.' Sara laughed and smiled and just fit in, a strikingly ordinary little piece amongst all of the other complex pieces of the puzzle.
Tyler had sidled up to her while she was retrieving crackers and they hugged and he stole her away to an abandoned table. "Where did you end up going to school again?" And he put his palm to his forehead, a polite man, forgetting an all too unimportant detail.
"Harvard," she replied simply, as if it wasn't much of an achievement.
His eyes lit up then. "Harvard! I was right down the street there, over at Northeastern! Must have been some sort of weird fate, huh?"
And though he talked of fate and had his warm, warm hand on her knee and yes, was looking at her with delightfully shining eyes, she couldn't help but wonder if there was a letter waiting on her in her mailbox at home.
---
It was too hot for her there, that he knew. He knew after she came in to her third shift looking like a crispy critter, burned all the way to her scalp. "I was moving furniture in," she explained and introduced herself to the tepid sludge that was the house specialty of the break room.
Even in the low light of the lab, he saw the angry red licking her skin. She must have been in pain; she was in pain, but the ever strong facade that he would come to know, come to nearly revere, was strongly in place as she poured some sugar into the concoction and left him.
He'd burned her; he really hadn't meant to.
---
One slip of her footing and she'd fallen up against him, her left side firmly planted on his chest. And her breath hitched hard and he heard her.
She pressed her lips to his briefly, solidly and in that space she felt her life play out in sniffles and letters and she recited the alphabet to herself as she pulled back, eyes downcast. That wasn't supposed to have happened.
"Please don't ever do that again," his words were a harsh whisper, but his forehead was pressed against hers and he was breathing just as hard as she was and she wanted to ask why not? She knew why not. They weren't divided by sheets of paper anymore, just by a few layers of clothing and skin.
She pulled away from him and she swore as she did his arm held her to him.
"We really need to finish up with this and get back up there," he coughed out, back to business. "Brass will want all the evidence on Evans as soon as possible."
The cool dampness of the basement did nothing to erase the mad red blush of embarrassment on her cheeks.
---
He tilted his head from one side to the other, regarding the space before him with agitation. There was something off about it.
There was enough room there for a few shirts, maybe a coat and a couple of pairs of pants but nothing more really. It wouldn't be an invitation of forever, but it was something.
They hadn't talked in awhile, and they had stopped being friends. But still, she was with him all the time and he'd figured out a way to ask her out to dinner without coming off sounding like a complete idiot. He'd formulated the answers to all of her questions, all of her possible rejections in advance.
He was ready… he was ready, sort of.
Again, he turned his attention to the bleak interior of the enclosure. Such a sad gesture, but a gesture it was, and that had to count for something. But what?
Even if no one knew he had cleared out a spot for her in his closet, at least he knew he was making some sort of obtuse progress.
---
"Sorry."
"No, no, it's okay," she insisted and grabbed the back of his neck.
"You sure?"
She shook her head in the negative. "It's, it's fine." And she smiled and they both laughed a little as he shifted and grunted and hung his head.
"I think I've forgotten how to do this," Grissom muttered, mirth still evident in his low voice.
Sara scoffed at him, smile growing. "You can't forget how, how to have sex."
And Grissom lifted his head then, eyes wide with fright and confusion. "I meant, I think I've forgotten how to make love."
"Oh."
Blowing a little puff of hot air through his lips, he kissed her cheeks as she struggled to comprehend the words.
Grissom bit his tongue and concentrated hard on her face, wanting to get it right, just get it right. "I don't know how to do this, Sara," he said, and she realized that he was no longer talking about the physical moment they were about to share. "Can you help me out?
Seven years old again, holding an amazing moment at arm's length, she fast forwarded nearly twenty-six and finally grasped it.
"Of course," she breathed as he slid all the way in and they both heaved a heavy sigh of relief and chuckled. "God," Sara moaned, meeting his eyes quickly.
"This is crazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzy."