Two: American Graffiti
The post pancake dinner dishes done, Grissom and Sara opted to spend the few hours left before bed curled up on the couch together. Hank, too, readily agreed, having insisted on taking his usual place at their feet.
While her husband quietly made his way through a trade paperback, Sara attempted to thumb her way through a couple of back issues of The Journal of Forensic Sciences, her usual go-to use work to get her mind off work technique.
Failing at this, she was in the midst of weighing whether or not she should just get up and pack a few more boxes when without a word, Gil Grissom nudged the neat stack of file folders towards his wife before rising to fill the teakettle in the kitchen.
Grissom hadn't asked about the papers or the case; Sara hadn't offered. Not that she didn't trust her husband with the work. Even nearly seven years retired from the field, Gil Grissom had a better grasp of forensics than anyone Sara knew.
Part of her had just wanted to keep the case's steep shadow from creeping into their new life together.
Far more intent on focusing on this life, the one she and her husband were currently working to build together, as she was, Sara for the most part, tried to put her Vegas life behind her these days.
Or at least the work.
So even after the subpoena arrived, Sara hadn't offered many details about the case which had brought them both back to Vegas. At her uneasy resignation, Grissom had opted not to press.
Considering the job (which he knew all too well) and Sara's natural reticence, Grissom was well aware his wife hadn't even come close to telling him everything that had happened over their last few years apart. He equally knew that his wife would talk about it when she was ready. Until then he would wait until she was.
By the time he placed a steaming mug in front of her, Sara was halfway through the first file. Sinking back down beside her, Grissom went back to his book.
As the evening wore on, he kept her company, refilled her tea, sat there with her, yet not interfering with her wearying work.
While she found she didn't really want to talk about it, neither could Sara banish the images of Megan Freeman's naked body tattooed in indelible ink, graffitied with all the worst words the English language held for women. That and the fact that the two boys who did that to her thought it was okay. Not only okay, but an act to brag about, to publish to the wide world.
Just the thought made her blood rage and her heart break.
It didn't help, her having to wade through the defense's usual discovery bullshit.
When Grissom refilled her cup unasked for the third time, Sara dragged her attention away from her pages. Giving him a grateful smile, she settled back into the cushions with a long drawn out exhale of frustration.
"That good, huh?" Grissom asked, not bothering to crack his book back open.
"Am still trying to work out how it could be worse."
"'And worse I may be yet. The worst is not so long as we can say "This is the worst,"'" he quoted sagely.
At her frown, he added, "Not helping?"
Right in one, Sara thought, but did not say.
Not really wanting to discuss the source of her own current vexation, she opted for a change in subject.
Indicating the volume in his lap, she hazarded to ask, "How's the book?"
With some people it was always best never to ask questions which you didn't already know the answer to, particularly as said answers frequently proved to be like the proverbial box of chocolates: you never knew what you were going to get. This proved particularly true when one was married to a man with insatiable curiosity and rather eclectic tastes.
One night, not long after they'd first been married, Sara had made the mistake of when upon coming to bed of asking after what her recently wedded husband was so intently perusing only to be informed, "The mating habits of Riccardoella limacum."
To which she could only spluttered, "Excuse me?"
Without batting an eye, he clarified, "Slug mite sex."
"I had to ask," she sighed.
What else could she have said to that?
His current paperback, The Life of Pi by Yan Martel, didn't appear nearly so exotic, the tiger huddled on one of the boats on the cover not withstanding. So she figured on the whole the question was a relatively safe one.
"Interesting," he replied, replacing his reading glasses though he didn't return to his book.
"Good interesting or bad interesting?" Sara asked.
"Tigers are always good interesting."
Sara chuckled at this, recalling as she did Grissom's particular fondness for a tiger named Hobbes.
"Particularly when tigers aren't just tigers," he added.
Sara, trying and failing to work that one out, perhaps it was the lateness of the hour or just her brain on information overload, decided to let that one go - for now.
"You'll have to let me borrow it when you're done," she said.
"My books are your books."
"Anything good I should know?" she asked, not searching for spoilers, as he well knew.
Typically, Grissom was in the habit of reading aloud particularly good bits in his books. That night, sensing Sara's dudgeon, he had elected to refrain from doing so as not to interfere with her work.
He dutifully flipped back several chapters before setting in to read:
"'It is true that those we meet can change us sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards...'"
"True," Sara agreed.
They shared a smile at this.
Then just noticing the lateness of the hour, she said, "You don't have to wait up, you know."
"I know," he replied. "I like reading with you."
It being a pleasure of the rather recently reacquired variety, it wasn't one Gil Grissom was all that keen on soon surrendering. Not after missing it - and her - for the past several years.
Not that Hank hadn't been good company. Sara was just better.
Thus they both went back to their pages.
After a while when Grissom's eyes began to grow heavy and his head began to nod, Sara, gently nudging him, urged, "Bed, Gil."
"I'm fine."
"You're half asleep -"
"I'd rather think of it as being half awake," he countered.
"You'll be stiff in the morning," she reminded him.
"I'm good here," he insisted.
Both far too fatigued to fight him and enjoying his presence far too much to protest, she simply shook her head at his stubbornness.
"What about you?" he asked.
After all, she had admitted rather reluctantly not all that many weeks before how it had become harder and harder for her these days to stay up anywhere near three nights straight.
He hadn't been able to resist teasing her about her Getting old then.
Of course Sara had given as much as she got, rejoining with an equally playful taunt of "Remember I'm not that much older than you were when we first met.
"Besides, if I'm getting old, what does that make you, Gilbert?"
Grissom opted not to remind her of this tonight. His wife, he knew, wasn't up for banter.
Sara gestured to the still daunting stack. "Just need to get through this."
So he left her to it.
Currently half awake, or no, all too soon Grissom was softly snoring, just as his wife suspected he would be. She really should wake him; prod him off to bed, only Sara didn't have the heart to disturb him.
Strangely, he did look comfortable. Very comfortable. Temptingly comfortable.
But as tempting as it might be to cozy up with him on the couch, then they'd both be sore in the morning. No, bed was better.
Finally having decided she'd had enough defense discovery for one night, Sara replaced his novel on the coffee table and gently eased off his spectacles before leaning in to lightly kiss him awake.
Before long, his hand was in her hair and his lips returning her pressure.
When Sara withdrew, his languid eyes crinkled with pleasure, him apparently not the least bit upset as to having been woken, particularly in that particular fashion.
"Bed, Gil," she murmured huskily.
Grissom sleepily, yet readily, agreed.
xxxxxxx
Some time just passed two, Sara screamed herself - and Grissom - awake.
Heart thudding, lungs gasping, shoulders shaking, she sat bolt upright wide-eyed in the dark.
Still struggling to throw off the last of her horror, she momentarily recoiled at her husband's tender touch before letting him gather her up in his arms.
Grissom didn't have to ask. He already knew.
The difficult cases always brought on the nightmares and this case he knew had been troubling Sara more than most.
He knew, too, that the best thing - the only thing - to be done was to hold her close. So he did, silently stroking her hair and back.
Trying to pour part of the peace she had long given him back into her, he rocked her gently as she clung sobbing into his shoulder. He didn't tell her to shush, or not to cry, nor murmured that falsest of platitudes that everything was going to be okay.
Instead, all he said was "I'm here. Honey, I'm here."
Too many times, he hadn't been. But he was now.
Take care of each other, the old Tico abogado had told them the first time they had been married. Somehow amongst the busyness of life, he had forgotten the wisdom of those words.
He wasn't about to forget them now. Or ever again. That mistake had already proven costly, nearly too costly for him to ever dare repeat. He may have failed Sara for a long time, too long, but not again. He intended to do as advised: care for his wife.
Perhaps he should have told her a long time ago that it was okay to fall to pieces, that he would be there to gather them - and her - back up again. But he hadn't told her then, nor could he quite find the words for it now. So he held her hard until Sara felt like she could finally breathe again.
Yes, Grissom definitely understood. He didn't suffer from nightmares, not the way Sara did, at least not since she'd come. Although like her, chronic insomnia had long been his nighttime nemesis.
Before Sara had returned, the only dreams he ever had of her post-divorce were nightmares, one of which was of her being back out there in the desert. Only in this dream he never found her. No matter how hard or how long he looked, she stayed lost and he was left to wake with her name on his lips to the reality of her being gone from his life.
While Sara had spent most of the last two months unbruised by sleep, tonight hadn't been her first nightmare since they had gotten back together, even if it did appear to be the worst of them.
They may have been fewer and farther in between as of late, but both Grissom and Sara knew the horrors would never completely vanish. Being out on the water, the rock and splash of the waves might change one's dreams, but even that couldn't keep the mind's twisted mischief at bay.
Nightmares were far, far more than just bad dreams. He supposed they were more the cruel machinations of a troubled soul. Sara was simply more troubled than most. And no wonder.
Usually on nights such as these, Sara cried herself out and nearly back to sleep; Grissom held her, wordlessly assuring her she was safe and loved. Frequently, it wasn't long before they were both back asleep again, at least for a little while.
Tonight wasn't that sort of night, or this that sort of dream.
After a long while, Sara stilled, her tightfisted grasp relaxed. Her eyes still a little wet, she peered up apologetically at her husband. Grissom leaned in to kiss the last of her tears from her cheeks.
They rested there, foreheads touching, until Sara said now far more chagrined than anything, "I got snot all over your shirt."
"It washes out," he simply said.
She half-hiccupped; half-laughed at this.
"Tea?" Grissom offered.
Sara nodded, wanting the chance to privately pull herself together more than the actual contents of the cup.
As her husband disappeared off to the kitchen, she padded off to the bathroom and without bothering to switch on the overhead light, proceeded to splash cold water on her face. Her heart might no longer be hammering that frenetic tattoo in her chest, but she still wasn't ready to meet her own eyes in the mirror just yet.
When she finally did return to bed, it was to find her husband already propped up on the pillows, casually stroking Hank's back and looking far too awake for the hour.
Without comment, he passed her one of the steaming cups from his bedside table. They sipped at their tea in companionable silence for a little while.
Sensing Sara's disquiet, Hank transferred his attention from master to mistress, lightly nudging her hand with his muzzle so he might, now that she too was settled sitting up, rest his head in her lap. Sara let him, absently rubbing him behind the ears, as much to soothe herself as the boxer.
Her tea mostly drunk, Grissom decided to confront the elephant in the room.
"You want to talk about it?" he asked.
"The dream?" Sara asked. "No."
Not when flashes of it still haunted her waking moments.
The yelling. The screaming.
Worse: the silence.
Blood, blood everywhere.
Yet here's a spot...
Except it wasn't her twelve-year-old hands held out before her, but her now more than forty ones stained crimson.
Here's the smell of the blood still.
From somewhere - but where? - She could hear water running, running, running.
Water, water everywhere but not a drop to wash with.
What, will these hands ne'er be clean?
No, not all the perfumes of Arabia could help her now.
Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.
Only when Sara finally turned to face her father, it wasn't his marble gaze that met her own. Nor was she back in her nightmare of a childhood home.
Instead, the naked body of a seventeen year old girl sprawled on the tile floor tattooed all over with words too foul to mention.
Back in her bedroom, Sara set her teacup down on the table beside her.
No, she most certainly did not want to talk about her dream.
Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth had nothing on Sara's subconscious.
"But the case," she said turning to her husband, "yeah."
xxxxxxx
"Victim's name was Megan Freeman," Sara began. "Seventeen. Freshman WLVU. Graduated a semester early from high school so she elected to start at the school in January. Bio/Pre-Med major. Already taking advanced courses. A bit of an overachiever."
Grissom smiled softly. Like someone else he knew, he thought.
"More smart than pretty or popular," she continued. "Her roommate figured she was probably still a virgin. No real boyfriends in high school. Said the boys weren't interested."
Boys that age were idiots, Grissom thought. Some of them never seemed to grow out of it. It had certainly taken him far, far too long.
"From her Facebook posts and what her parents knew, Megan was excited to be at college. To try new things. Meet new people.
"And she was a huge basketball fan. Huge. That was part of the reason she selected WLVU in the first place, because of the team.
"First home game of the new year, she and a bunch of other girls were invited by a few of the players to this big celebratory party off campus.
"Just two weeks into her first semester and a couple of basketball gods were giving her attention, it must have seemed like her lucky day. How was she to know the senior players got the juniors to ask as many pretty girls as they could find, wanted the house stocked full. Plenty of choice that way, I guess.
"Sports really weren't my scene," Sara shrugged.
They hadn't been Grissom's either, apart from pro baseball. But they both already knew this.
"So, anyway, Megan went back to her dorm. Put on a new outfit. We found the tags in her trash. Tight jeans, push-up bra, low cut top. Not what she regularly wore, but the usual party wear. She probably just wanted to fit in."
Most people did. One of the most human of all impulses was to belong.
"She posted a selfie of herself all done up for her first real college party at 10:08.
"We know from various Social Media posts from others at the party that she got there sometime before 10:45. After that, we found her in the background of a few pics, doing what girls do at parties like that."
"Drinking," Grissom supplied.
Sara nodded.
"Megan weighed one ten, maybe. So it wouldn't have taken much to go from buzzed to drunk. Not with the punch they were serving. The stuff must have been near 180 proof judging from the residue we found in some of the cups.
"Plus, her stomach contents, or lack there of, indicated she probably hadn't eaten anything since around lunch time.
"On an empty stomach, all that liquor went straight to her head.
"No one remembers, or admits they remember seeing Megan at the party. Not even the girls from the game. So what happened next is mostly conjecture.
"At some point during the night two guys took her up to one of the bedrooms. She may have gone willingly, but considering her B.A.C. was still above the legal limit hours after she left the party, I doubt she was thinking clearly, if at all, at the time.
"That and one of the guys slipped her a Rohypnol chaser as an insurance policy."
"She was roofied?" Grissom asked appalled.
Sara nodded. "GCMS indicated the presence of 7-aminoflunitrazepam, a metabolite of flunitrazepam - Rohypnol, at concentrations of more than 80 micrograms per liter. Nearly twice the usual impairment level.
"She couldn't have said no if she wanted to.
"You can't consent when you're passed out.
"Once there they stripped her. We found her ripped panties in the trash. And several buttons were missing from her blouse. So maybe she had a chance to fight back. Though the only DNA under her fingernails was her own.
"Then at some point, the two guys decided they needed to make sure Megan knew what they really thought of her. So they tattooed her in Sharpie.
"Sharpie?" Grissom echoed in disbelief.
"Sharpie," Sara nodded. "With words like bitch, whore, tease, nf2f..."
"Nf2f?" Grissom asked.
"Not fit to..."
From his frown of disgust, Sara didn't need to finish.
"Once they'd finished their masterpiece, they proceeded to post pictures on Snapchat all under the caption Bitch was beggin' for it."
Sara stopped, needing a moment to contain her anger and outrage before she continued.
"Whether it was before or after their little photo shoot we don't know, but apparently the boys thought it would be even more fun to go ahead and object rape her with a used beer bottle.
"Guess they'd seen enough T.V. to know better than to engage in personal sexual contact, even with a condom. They certainly knew to wipe their fingerprints from the glass."
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," Grissom offered. "Too many people watch way too much television and start to think they can outthink the evidence."
"Only the evidence never lies," Sara replied. "PERK was negative for sperm or spermicide," she continued. "No condom trace evidence either. But definite signs of abuse. Both bruising and tearing.
"I did the exam myself."
Both Doc Robbins and Dave had left her to it. Even they had looked a little sick at the sight of Megan's body lying there on the slab inked all over.
Nor had either made any protest when after they had completed a far more subdued than usual post, Sara insisted on cleaning the graffiti from Megan's body herself.
It didn't matter that the tedious, heart-rending cleanup was far more the work of an undertaker than a forensic investigator, no parent should have to see their daughter written on like that.
Sara shook her head, trying to erase the image of the word cunt scribbled just above Megan Freeman's pubic bone.
"She didn't have a clue, when she finally came to. What happened to her," Sara said softly. "Maybe that's one good thing."
"Anterograde amnesia," Grissom supplied, knowing it to be one of the side effects of this particular date rape drug.
"Probably felt fairly woozy, confused," Sara said. "Definitely hung over. Sore. Sick to her stomach."
All also side effects of being roofied, apart from the sore part.
"Somehow Megan made it back to her dorm sometime before 3 a.m.
"That's when she was found, just after three.
"Back in her room, she must have checked her phone before going to bed. We found a chat window open. One of the girls on the floor had messaged her, wanted to know if the girl in the attached screen captures was her.
"Those pictures were the last thing she ever pulled up.
"I can't begin to imagine what she must have been thinking when she took off her clothes to check. We know she did. Found her party clothes in a heap on the floor and a crack in her mirror that wasn't there earlier that night. She must have grabbed her robe and raced to the shower.
"There she tried to scrub it all away. Water was turned up as hot as it would go. Maybe she didn't know soap and water doesn't work on Sharpie.
"You need hand sanitizer or hairspray to have any hope of getting it to come off. Maybe she was just desperate; just wanted it off.
"But not all the perfumes of Arabia..." Sara half quoted.
"When her fingernails didn't seem to make any difference, she tried to scrape it off.
"You can still cut yourself with a safety razor, particularly if you're determined. Only when that didn't work -
"It's unsure if she broke her pocket mirror on accident or on purpose. All we do know for sure is she used it to slice herself from wrist to elbow on both arms.
"She knew what she was doing," Sara finished.
"Death by exsanguination?" Grissom asked, his voice soft and sad with the shock of it.
"You'd think that, but no," she said. "Doc says drowning. Found water in her lungs.
"She must have passed out, either from the shock, the alcohol, the drugs, the blood loss - any - all of it.
"When she collapsed her body blocked the drain. With the water still running..."
"She drowned in only a few inches of water," Grissom finished.
Sara nodded. "That's how we found her. Although someone had turned off the water before we got there.
"A girl on her floor stumbled in to... to be sick. Too much fun, I guess. Too much alcohol at least. When she ended up with wet knees, she was pissed. Pounded on the shower stall.
"The lock must have been faulty as the girl ended up with a really good look at Megan sprawled across the floor.
"She puked all over my shoes while I was interviewing her," Sara finished.
Not that she could blame the freshman. The sight of the naked wisp of a seventeen year old slumped on the tile with all those words scrawled across her skin, had left Sara, a seasoned crime scene investigator, more than a little nauseated herself.
The two perpetrators, Sara refused to think of them as the accused, however, made her blood boil. Cocky, self-important jocks, the both of them, with Big Man on Campus written all over them. Two guys who thought that their success on the court entitled them to take what they wanted - when they wanted - how they wanted. Even if it wasn't freely given.
Sara hated the whole BMOC bullshit. She'd made the mistake in college of giving into a guy like that once, but however ultimately unsatisfying the entire encounter had been, at least theirs had been consensual, definitely overrated, but still consensual.
Only in this case, the guys didn't just think that drugging and raping a girl at a party was okay. That on top of defiling and defacing her in private, publicly degrading her was not only perfectly acceptable, it was something to boast about. They were proud to present to the world a record of what they'd done.
They weren't quite so proud by the time she and Julie Finn had gotten Justin Baker and Jimmy Roberts into an interrogation room at Las Vegas Metro. They hadn't dared brag there.
Initially, they had pleaded ignorance. Sure, they were at the party, so were more than a hundred other people. Jimmy's parents had a great big place out near the Tournament Players Club in Summerlin. So what?
"A hundred and seven, if social media is to believed," Sara informed them.
It had taken her and Finn nearly a week to track down every individual in the party pics and swab them.
Sara, consulting the sheet in front of her, said, "Forty-eight of them males, thirteen of them from the WLVU basketball team."
"Yeah, a couple of guys from the team couldn't make it," Baker agreed.
"Well, only the two of you were a DNA match."
"Match to what? Neither of us had sex with anyone at that party," Roberts protested.
"I never said we found semen. I said DNA," Sara countered.
"We found the bottle," Finn told them. "With Megan Freeman's vaginal fluid on the rim. And an admixture of both of your DNA inside."
Of course neither she nor Sara told the boys they had had to swab and process over a hundred bottles from the Roberts' trash before they had managed to find anything.
"Guess you two had to share a beer before you raped her," said Sara.
"A little Dutch courage?" Finn suggested equally coldly.
When the boys couldn't work out how they possibly could have found any DNA to link them to Freeman, Sara supplied, "You forgot about the backwash. Bottle may have looked empty, but there's always a thin layer of saliva left behind on the inside.
"PCR is a wonderful thing. Amplifies even the most minuscule amount of DNA. All you need is a microdrop."
"That match got us a warrant to check your rooms," said Finn providing them with a copy.
"Which was where we found these, Jimmy," Sara said placing an evidence bag full of little round white pills on the table before them.
Jimmy Roberts shrugged. "They're just herbal supplements."
"Herbal supplements you just happened to pick up when you were in Mexico for Christmas?" Finn asked. "Those sorts of pills turn out to be pretty easy to come by down there, don't they - for the right price."
Roberts made no reply to this.
Sara pulled a second sheet from her file folder. "Chemistry says they're flunitrazepam."
"Rohypnol - roofies to you," Finn translated helpfully.
"And a schedule IV substance. Possession of which in the United States is punishable by three years in jail and a fine." Sara gave the bag a little shake. "This many pills could easily be argued as possession with intent to distribute. That alone will get you 20 years.
"As for the rape, you two are aware that subjecting an unconscious victim to sexual penetration of any kind qualifies as rape in the state of Nevada? And that it carries a maximum sentence of life in prison?" Sara asked.
From their sudden shocked stares, apparently they hadn't been aware.
"So," Sara continued, "while Justin here might be eligible for parole after fifteen years, Jimmy, you're going to be lucky to make it out before you hit retirement age."
Jimmy Roberts scoffed. Gesturing to his friend, he said, "Look at us. We rule that team. We rule that school. You think either of us needed to roofie someone in order to get laid? We could have had any girl at that party. All we had to do was ask."
At this, Sara had a hard time keeping the bitterness from her voice as she countered, "Except consensual sex wasn't what you went for that night. Wasn't enough of a thrill for you, right?
"That and Megan Freeman was Nf2f?"
She placed a photograph, a close-up of the words scribbled on Megan's skin, on the table.
"You wrote it right on her."
Of course when Jimmy Roberts' parents hired Mark Ellington, the eminent defense attorney argued before the judge at the pretrial hearing that the boys were young, had their whole lives ahead of them. Even if somehow they were convicted, and of course that was a big if Ellington maintained, society shouldn't allow this one isolated incident to ruin the rest of their lives.
They were just boys being boys after all.
Naturally, Ellington had conveniently forgotten to mention Megan who no longer had a life because of what his clients had chosen to do.
Seventeen years old and her life really was over.
Only when the case finally came to court, he wouldn't forget Megan then. Ellington would make sure that it was Megan Freeman on trial instead of Roberts and Baker. He would offer up every last detail of Megan's all too brief life for public judgment and scrutiny as if to say, Look, the girl was asking for what she got, just like the caption to the photos said.
Rape was the only crime Sara knew where the victim was the one presumed guilty until proven innocent.
No one ever said of a car accident victim: Maybe you shouldn't have been in such a hurry. Or to someone who had been mugged: Maybe you should have left that expensive watch at home. To a family that had been burgled no one ever told them: Maybe you shouldn't have so many expensive electronics visible through your front windows.
But a woman who goes out in a short skirt, tight jeans or wears a low cut blouse, she's asking to be raped. As if her permission is implied by the clothing she wears or the places she frequents or the drinks she consumes and words like No and Stop don't matter.
To Sara what the woman wore, what the woman drank, where the woman went, whom the woman went with, not one of those things mattered the minute that woman said No.
No meant No. And Stop meant Stop Now.
Drugged as she was, Megan Freeman didn't even get the right to refuse. Those boys took that, too, away from her.
As Sara finished telling him all this, Grissom didn't bother to ask why Megan didn't just tell someone. Sadly, he already knew.
The numbers didn't lie. Sixty to seventy percent of all rapes went unreported and no wonder. Out of a hundred cases, of those forty reported, only 10 reports ever led to an actual arrest and out of those, only four resulted in a felony conviction.
In the end, only three rapists out of a hundred spent more than one day in jail.
That was if anyone believed the girl in the first place.
In Megan's case, she was just some nobody freshman who went willingly to a party. The boys who had assaulted her were basketball gods.
And gods didn't have to follow the rules of men.
Or so the world too frequently seemed to say.
Perhaps it was too much to ask of a seventeen-year-old girl, to have her have to fight that fight. Perhaps it was too much to ask of anyone.
The question, however, should never have ever needed to come up.
Grissom had never understood - could never understand - what caused men to do those sorts of things to women.
If sex without love was pointless and only left one feeling sad, taking something that should never be taken, only accepted when freely given, horrified him.
True, he knew rape had little to do with sexual gratification. It was all about power and a form of domination he couldn't comprehend.
Megan Freeman deserved better than that. Every rape survivor, for survivors were what they were, deserved better than that.
Already dead at seventeen, Megan would never know what he, himself, hadn't truly learned until he was nearly fifty, that closeness, that connection, how that making love with someone you loved and whom loved you in return was a happiness beyond anything he had ever known.
Sure, he'd had sex with other women before Sara. Not many, but there had been a few. It hadn't been the same. Not even close.
His brief time with Heather Kessler may have helped open his heart; demonstrated that he didn't need to always be the one in control, that it was okay to feel, to open himself up to another human being, to risk being hurt. That he didn't have to always live behind that carefully constructed mask of his. But Sara Sidle had shown him love and acceptance like no one else ever had, awkwardness, insects and all.
It made his heart hurt to think Megan would now never even get a chance at that.
From the current despondent slump of Sara's shoulders, his wife seemed resigned to thoughts very much the same.
"Look," she maintained, attempting to regain some of the objectivity she knew she was sorely lacking at the moment. "I know I can't undo what's done. I can't bring Megan back. Her life is over. Gone.
"But I can make sure those boys know what they did was not okay.
"And at least this way hopefully they'll never be able to do that to anyone else ever again. That is at least something. That's why I have to do this.
"Someone has to stand up and say this is not okay."
Grissom nodded. He took up her hand and gave it a supportive squeeze in wordless agreement.
In that moment, like so many in the years that he'd had the pleasure to know her, he was proud, fiercely proud, of his wife.
xxxxxx
A/N: Strangely there really is an actual species of slug mites where the unborn male actually impregnates his female siblings while within the womb, therefore breeding without even having actually been born.
Weird, I know.
I encountered this odd little tidbit in Jules Howard's bizarre, yet thoroughly entertaining book, Sex on Earth, a volume I could see Grissom being fascinated by.
As for the inspiration for why Grissom might be reading about slug mite sex in the first place, one night I was in the middle of reading a chapter on T-Rex sex (in another book) when I wondered what I would write back if someone had happened to send me one of those casual What are you up to? texts: Just reading about dinosaur sex?
Sadly, while Grissom wouldn't have blushed, I probably would have.
P. S. Don't ask why I was reading about sex in the Jurassic period in the first place.
You don't want to know...
xxxxxxx
On a far more serious note, Megan Freeman's story is loosely based on an actual case, that of 15 year old girl in Saratoga, California who in 2012 hung herself after not only having been assaulted at a party, further found herself publicly humiliated when her rapists wrote and drew obscene things all over her body and then circulated the pictures throughout her high school.
She had known her assailants since junior high.
And it was eight months after her death before any of her three attackers were even arrested.
For a more detailed and in depth look at the issue of rape on college campuses, check out the 2015 documentary The Hunting Grounds.
Sadly, there are far too many times (100,000 each year alone) when and where the truth is far more frightening than any fiction.