A/N: This is my first story, so please be gentle. Special thanks to graciebutterfliedgsr and Giwu for all the help!
"No, I don't," he answered simply, in that cool, almost detached tone he usually reserved for lectures. It was all part of the Professor Grissom façade she had once found so charming and intriguing. If she were honest with herself, she still did, only now maddening, aggravating, and exasperating were also thrown into the mix.
"Well," she stumbled, trying to give voice to her anxious fear that she was smothering him. She couldn't help but be terrified that she would somehow push him away and lose that tenuous hold on whatever it was they were doing here. "I just, I guess I was afraid that I was suffocating you…I mean, we spend so much time together, and I just didn't want you to feel like I was monopolizing your time. You know, we work together, come home together, go to sleep together, wake up together, then do it all over again, and I mean, I like being with you, I do, I really do, and I don't really want to change anything, but I just…didn't want you to feel like you had to always be with me. I don't want to…stifle you. I mean, I know you like your alone time, and you can have that, you don't have to worry about hurting my feelings..." She sighed, as she realized she was rambling; she seriously thought she was over this particular defense mechanism. A self-deprecating, lopsided grin appeared on her lips. "I'm over talking again, aren't I?"
That look. The one with the raised eyebrow, followed by the smug squinting of eyes and pursing of lips. God, how she despised that look, and yet was always drawn to it. It filled her with the compelling urge to wipe that almost-smirk off his face. Or kiss it off.
"I guess I was waiting for the other shoe to drop…" She was hesitant, felt almost foolish, as a slight tinge of embarrassment colored her usually pale complexion.
"So…when it didn't, you thought you'd toss it to the floor yourself?" The barely perceptible upward quirk of his lips belied the indignation his tone was attempting but didn't quite reach.
"Something like that." Her eyes barely met his as she murmured her response.
"Sara…"
His voice trailed off, as it frequently did.
She wondered how two syllables so familiar -- known through a lifetime of repetition and recognition -- could, when uttered through his lips, become both a question and answer. How the word could start its journey as an innocuous title, yet somehow traverse the synapses connecting thought and speech, reverberate across his vocal chords, and escape his quirked lips with a breathy intonation that held the promise of eloquence, but was halted by hesitation, and consequently was left hanging in the air as a question unasked, an answer unspoken.
Her name, Saratwo syllables, modernized version of a classic moniker, Sarah, meaning 'daughter of Abraham,' or princess in Hebrew. A simple name, really. Plain as the nose on her face. A mere means of identification, no greater significance. Surely nothing on par with the profound prose that so often held his intrigue and spouted from his lips in abundant quotation.
But from him, it was the summation of all the things he simply couldn't say, though, she suspected and hoped, not for lack of trying.
It was as if his heart knew exactly the right words to say to her in any given situation, but the sentiment, filtered through his overactive, censoring mind, somewhere on the path between thought and speech, eluded the grasp of his tongue, and what came out in place of the perfect declaration of love begging to be escaped was nothing more than her name. Sara. Yet he somehow still expected her to know intrinsically what he meant through his non-declaration.
It was both mind-numbingly frustrating and sweetly endearing.
And for years, she accepted this from him. She treasured what little he offered, even if it was just her name, her name, for God's sake, uttered from his lips because it was all he could come up with, and that was enough.
But now that just wouldn't cut it.
Not when she knew what those same two syllables sounded, felt like as they escaped his breath in soft caresses against her neck as he thrust into her. Not when she heard the altered timbre of her name colliding with his muffled moans of pleasure. Not when his heated gaze bore into her soul as he repeated it again and again like a mantra, "Sara…Sara…Sa-ra…" until he spilled into her and collapsed under the weight of the unuttered words of his love.
No, this time he was going to have to give her a little more than a breathy 'Sara…' and a meaningful gaze. She wanted…well, she wasn't sure exactly what it was she wanted from him. Just something...more. She needed to feel that they'd made progress since clumsily collapsing into bed together; that this…this, whatever it was, was going somewhere.
To his credit, he seemed to pick up on what she wasn't saying, and, not for the first time since being granted access to this more personal side of him, she was struck by just how intuitive he could be with regard to the needs of others. Of course, he rarely made an outward attempt to actually go about fulfilling any emotional of those needs he intuited. But the fact remained that he was deftly aware of these feelings, despite not knowing what to do with this awareness. And he seemed to know he was deficient in this respect; that he lacked sufficient aptitude with this particular interpersonal skill, and rather than expose his vulnerability by fumbling through an emotional connection, he simply abstained from all attempts.
She couldn't really blame him, though. It was a natural defense mechanism. But she still wanted to poke a tiny hole through those defenses, just wide enough to allow her the faintest glimpse into his heart, for she was certain that what she would see there would be…everything.
So, he needed to step just outside his comfort zone. Just a little bit. She needed him to fumble, to expose even the slightest bit of his vulnerability, so hers wouldn't be left out there all by its lonesome.
And he was trying; he really was. He promised himself to make a concerted effort to give her what she needed, to give himself to her as much as he was capable of, because he knew she would be everything to him. And God help him, a part of him, the most honest and raw part, was determined, desperate to be what she needed, to be the one to make her happy, especially after he spent years convincing himself that he could never fill this particular role.
So, he fumbled.
He let go of his inhibitions, and fumbled his way around an explanation.
"Sara," he began again, but this time didn't let the word hang unbidden in the air for too long. The rest of his words were softly spoken, sometimes with considerable pauses between them, but they were painstakingly sincere, so much so that his eyes could barely meet hers as he fumbled outside his carefully constructed comfort zone.
"For years I convinced myself…well, attempted to convince myself is more accurate, I suppose…I tried to convince myself that I was one of those people that was better off alone. I told myself that I didn't need any personal…attachments. And for the most part, it was fine. I mean, I didn't really feel the loss, didn't see there was something missing, you know?" He chanced a look at her, but she simply nodded, silently urging him to continue. "It was like I was alone in a glass…cell, well maybe 'cell' isn't the right word; it wasn't a prison…well, I guess it was a prison cell of sorts, but it was all of my own making."
He sighed, unsure of where he was trying to go. This was precisely why he'd prefer not to fumble through his own words, why the ease of the quotes was always so alluring. Quotations were as concrete as science -- they had their beginning and end, with a logical progression of steps in between. He knew exactly what was coming next, and though different variables yielded different results, each had an anticipated outcome decided in advance. But, he had to admit, the true exhilaration often came from those unanticipated results; the element of surprise that was not altogether uncomfortable, just a shock to his system, much like the thrill of a roller coaster, but even that was controlled chaos. Great, he thought to himself, I'm even rambling in my mind. Another sigh. Focus, he chastised himself as he determinedly wandered further and further away from his comfort zone.
"It's like I was behind a glass barrier. Glass, as in I could see what was going on around me, but was still separated from it, you know? And really, I think I was okay with it. It was comfortable. I was comfortable. Until I met you." He sighed again, as she crinkled her forehead. He always thought she was so adorable when she did that, and it struck him then just how important it was that he make her understand what he was feeling, no matter how hard it was to get the words out. He continued with a newfound determination.
"When I met you, it was like a breath of fresh air was finally blown into that cell, and for the first time I realized how truly stifled I was before it. I didn't know I couldn't breathe until I felt what breathing was like…until I felt what it was to truly be alive. But like any fool, it terrified me."
A sudden thought occurred to him, and he treaded a little closer to his comfort zone and grabbed hold of a literary analogy to help clarify his point. "You've read Plato's Allegory of the Cave, right?" A simple nod and quirked eyebrow urged him on. "Well, the people bound in the cave in darkness were kind of like me. They were so accustomed to their life of darkness that the tiniest ray of light was the cause of so much pain to them, that they preferred the darkness. And Plato's whole point, of course, was that those who ascended out of the cave, out of the comfort of their blind ignorance, into the harsh light of knowledge, were ultimately better off. Though their paths were much harder on them, it was so much more fulfilling ultimately. The light was the truth, and it wasn't easy by any means, but it was true, it was the ultimate beauty, and that was worth it. Sara," he closed his eyes, shook his head, then opened them once again and glanced at her, met her eyes, caught sight of the recognition and understanding in the sheen of unshed tears blanketing those brown depths, and finally knew how to continue.
"Sara, you're that light. I knew it right from the beginning. You awakened something in me that brought me to life even while it terrified me. I ran from it, ran from you for so long, trying to stay in my dark cave, trying to stay suffocating in my stifling glass cell, but deep down I knew that you were my way out of all that if I'd just let you in. God help me, Sara, I don't know how to not screw this up, but I do know that I can't go back to that, and I don't even want to. I really don't. I'm so far out of my comfort zone right now that it boggles my mind that I'm even saying these things to you, standing here rambling about caves and glass cells, and calling you 'my light' and a 'breath of fresh air' and feeling like some cheesy cliché, but I'd rather be here rambling and fumbling around you than to never know what it feels like to truly…breathe, to live life…with you. So, in answer to your question, no, I don't feel the slightest bit suffocated by you, or by this relationship. It's the opposite; I finally feel like I can really breathe."
A/N part deux: I know there are countless interpretations of the infamous suffocation conversation, but the one I'm going with, as far as this story is concerned, is that Sara brought up the whole idea of suffocating each other out of fear that Grissom would retreat, to sort of beat him to the punch. So Grissom's whole "Maybe they were suffocating each other and he couldn't breathe" bit was a sort of defensive reaction to that. And then they had this conversation. Make sense? No? Oh, well, I tried! Feel free to share your thoughts. It would totally make my day!