DISCLAIMER: They're not mine. At all.
Even if he didn't know it as well as he knows his own name, Nick would have been able to guess how very insecure she was as they seemed to take two steps forward, one step back in a bizarre faltering dance.
He can be infinitely patient with her sometimes. At those times he can see past her shaky facade of distance and disinterest to anxiety and the shadows of the past. Scientist, mathematician, he can add her hopes and dreams, subtract all that she's lost, divide by the number of times she's had her heart broken and multiply by the force of her fears and equal "Sara" - he can understand her with a clarity that sometimes scares him. At those times he can laugh with her, hold her when she needs it, and when she retreats behind her barriers he can withdraw with a minimum of resentment.
Those are usually the times he's most comfortable with himself.
Sometimes - and he loathes himself for this - he pushes too far, presses too hard. Sometimes he wants things she doesn't know how to give, things like affection that have long been alien to her. She'll kiss him back happily if he kisses her first; and she can tell him how much she cares, stumbling over her words as she tries to make sense of emotion, and for her that's so much easier than reaching out a hand to bridge the gap between them. He knows in his times of clarity that touch is foreign to her and initiating it even more so. In the other times he gets frustrated, because he's the one to begin everything, and he can't help feeling that she must know by now that he'd never reject or rebuff her.
He's playing a waiting game. Waiting for her to believe that he's not like Gil Grissom or Hank Peddigrew or any of the other men who've hurt her in so many ways. Waiting for her to accept that "I love you" meant so many different things, all at once, and that he means them when he says it, and waiting for her to be able to say it back. Waiting for the day he feels her lips brush unexpectedly across his cheek, or the sudden warmth of her hands on his skin.
He's just waiting, most of the time, frustrated or patient or sometimes both. Only occasionally does he wonder why, and then the answers are always right at hand. He waits because she has a smile like no other he's seen before, and eyes that express more than a novel. She knows far too much about so many things, yet she's wonderfully naive about some things he takes for granted. She's tough, but she's also so sensitive and vulnerable he wonders how she copes. He waits because he has hope, inspired by honestly spoken words, by the way she lets him brush her hair, by the fact that, increasingly often, she'll go to bed with him and stay there, her body pressed close against his, until it's time for work again.
He waits, because loving Sara is both the hardest and the easiest thing he's ever done, and he can't do anything else.
THE END