AN: I didn't have time to look over this properly so please feel free to correct any errors.
"You wanna go for coffee?"
The words startled Sara Sidle and she spun to face her colleague and friend at the Las Vegas crime lab, Nick Stokes.
Nick had chiselled good looks, a square-set jaw line, dark eyes and hair and a loose Texas accent. Sara considered him one of her best friends at the lab. He had been one of the only ones there to make her feel welcome when she first arrived, besides Greg…and Grissom of course. Grissom. That was why he wanted to go for coffee with her in the first place. She knew what he was going to say. He probably didn't expect them to keep this from him, her or Grissom. But they had to. Nick must have understood that. What could he possibly say that would change anything?"
She sighed, looked him the eye. "Nick…if this is about-"
He cut her off quickly, "Just a coffee, yeah?"
And what could be so bad about that? They were friends; they'd been for coffee plenty of times before. The only difference was that now Nick knew her biggest secret and she had no idea what he thought about it.
"Just a coffee," she repeated. "Okay."
Nick chose one the 24 hour cafes that littered the streets in Vegas and they sat by the window opposite each other and ordered. Sara stared out of the window while they waited for their order to come, avoiding Nick's gaze. She knew that once their eyes met he would question her with things like 'Why didn't you tell me?' and 'How long has this being going on?' He probably had the best intentions but no-one had seemed more shocked than him when Grissom had finally announced it. He was with Sara. And they had been keeping their relationship a secret for almost 2 years now. Except he chose not to mention the last part.
When the waitress brought their drinks over, Sara stared into her coffee as if in deep though.
"What are you thinking?" Nick asked her.
"Hmm?" she looked up for a mere second.
"Well either your coffee is really interesting or there's something on your mind."
"There are lots of things on my mind," she replied "my new case for one…"
"Sara, you know I wasn't talking about work."
She slowly sipped her coffee. "I know. I just…"
"Don't want to talk about it?"
"About what?" she asked, her absent-mind concentrating intently on the coffee.
Nick didn't say anything for a while. He drank some of his coffee and leaned back in his seat as if thinking of what to say. A couple of minutes and sips of coffee later, he offered an answer. "You and Grissom."
She shot him a look. "Why are you so interested?"
"The whole damn lab knew you had a…thing with him. I'm just asking when that thing became serious."
Sara shrugged, taking another drink from her coffee cup. "We should get back to the lab soon. Hodges will have finished with the fibres I gave him."
"Sara, we only left the lab twenty minuets ago." Nick pointed out.
She shrugged but said nothing else in he hope that he would give up on the whole 'Get Sara to Talk' plan.
It seemed to work for a while as he drank most of his coffee and studied her face silently. She gazed out of the window, taking an occasional sip form her drink, her face washed with thought as though she was looking over a crime scene. But this was something that Sara could not relate to work. Work was her life. Work was Grissom's life. To some extend, Nick considered it to be his own life too. Work was their reasoning. 'We couldn't tell you because we had the lab to think of.' So why bother saying anything now? What difference did it make? What would sitting here change? Sara was not going to open up to him. Some friendships have their boundaries and he hadn't realised that with Sara, every friendship had boundaries.
Both of them sat with empty cups, an awkward tension around them and neither knew what to say. Sara chanced a glance at him to see that he was still staring at her as if trying to make sense o it all.
"Do you…?" Nick started, quickly changing his mind and shaking his head.
She looked at him. "What?"
"Nah doesn't matter." With his coffee cup now empty, he began to toy with it, swirling it in small circles around the table top between them both. "You wouldn't answer me anyway."
"You don't know that."
And he said it, the question he had been trying to ask her since he had first heard that she was with Grissom. "Do you love him?"
There was a short shocked silence in which she just stared at him. He thought she wasn't going to answer but then she let her eyes drop to the bottom of her empty cup and she whispered, "Yes. Yes I do."
He smiled faintly, not forcefully but certainly not all genuine. "I think…I think he loves you too."
Sara's head snapped up. She was not expecting such a response. "I…I hope so." She smiled weakly back at him and he stood up.
"Come on, let's get back to the lab."
Back at the lab, Sara entered Grissom's office.
"Hey," he said, glancing up from the pile of paperwork in front of him. "You know, shift's nearly over."
She smiled and stepped further into the room. "Yeah…it is."
He smiled back, standing up and walking towards her. "So…you wanna go for coffee?"