Unexpected

Four:

An Unexpected Admission

Gil Grissom for his part, was deep in a different sort of contemplation – a now very much quieter one, as he had gladly shut off Sara's CD player at the first chance he got.

No, it was her kitchen that had him deep in thought.

A thorough search of Sara's cupboards had yielded no further supplies of coffee. He had forgotten to tell her that he had used the last of her supply when he had made them some the day before.

Although it was apparent that Sara had ventured out for boxes since he had last paid her a visit, she had not replenished her supply of coffee, nor had she stopped for groceries of any kind.

In point of fact, it seemed that she hadn't been to the store for quite some time.

There were some canned vegetables, a few boxes of half-opened noodles of various shapes and sizes and a couple of jars of generic pasta sauce taking up space on the highest shelf. The detritus of crackers and other miscellanea occupied the rest of the cabinets.

After seeing the state of her food supply, Grissom began to wonder if Sara had stopped eating regularly.

Perhaps, that is why she seemed so pale and wan lately – fragile almost.

When he had helped her to her feet just moments before, she had hardly felt as if she weighed anything at all. And the glimpse of her bare legs and arms had left him with the impression that her limbs looked a just little too thin, the skin stretched a little too tight against her collarbones.

He should have followed his original plan and brought food with him. The receipt of her letter, however, had quickly expelled all thought, save for the one that demanded he see her immediately, out of his head.

For a few minutes, Grissom puttered in the kitchen trying to get the image of Sara in that robe out of his mind.

Now was not the time or place to be indulging in one of his Sara Sidle fantasies, especially as he knew she was getting dressed in the next room.

With a sigh, he surrendered any hope of finding coffee and knocked hesitantly on her bathroom door.

"Sara –"

There was a loud thud, a soft curse (which made Grissom smile for some reason) and then a hesitant, if slightly annoyed, "Yes?"

"You –?"

"Yeah, just clumsy," she answered, having just tripped as she tried to sit down to pull on a pair of jeans.

Then observing the shadow of his feet darkening the lower edge of the doorframe, she realized he was still standing on the other side of her door.

"Did you need something?" She finally asked as she hurriedly pulled her disheveled hair into a crude ponytail.

With a quick glance at the mirror, she frowned slightly at her appearance, but it would have to do, she told herself.

From the other side of the door, Grissom finally answered,

"You're out of coffee."

It had taken him a few minutes to reply because his -- now in some ways better than it had been before -- hearing caught the rasp of a zipper, the slither of cotton on skin and her light footfalls on the tile.

So intent on listening to the sounds of her, he had almost missed her words.

"-- Tea, in the tin on the counter -- by the stove. It's labeled 'tea,' Grissom."

Ah, how could he have missed the obvious? He wondered.

"I don't have any cream, but I think the milk in the fridge is still good – and no, its not soy milk. Sugar's on the counter…"

Grissom had retreated into the relative safety of the kitchen sometime around the time she mentioned soy milk, barely able to hear her continue to prattle on in that way she always seemed to do when she was just a tad flustered.

Sara knew she couldn't help it. She was always over-talking when it came to Gil Grissom – a habit she had never quite grown out of and one that had caused her an endless amount of embarrassment.

By the time Sara joined him in the kitchen, Grissom was pouring steaming water into a pair of mugs with all the due care and diligence he exuded over his many and varied experiments.

That was something Sara had long ago noticed and admired about him, Grissom always did everything with meticulous care.

At least until she came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder, causing him to start and drop the kettle, splashing hot water all over both of his hands.

He gave an involuntary cry of pain and accidentally knocked one of the mugs off the counter. It shattered noisily on the tiled floor.

Both Sara and Grissom apologized profusely as they simultaneously bent down to clear up the mess.

He quickly shooed her away, gesturing to her bare feet as the reason for why she had to vacate the kitchen immediately.

Having been banished to the entrance way, Sara took this moment to watch an unguarded Gil Grissom.

Truth be told, Grissom was looking a little tired. He probably hadn't slept much in the past day or so.

Neither had she, but that was normal for her.

Sleep had always been problematic for her, a twisted sort of game of Russian Roulette with the nightmares, more often than not, haunting her dreams and leaving her to wake up with her heart practically pounding out of her chest and her feeling breathless, dazed, confused and, if truth be told, a little afraid.

The old memories never seemed to die away.

Even if she could manage to banish them from her waking mind, they would simply return when she slept.

Of course, she had never really told anyone about the almost daily night terrors, although they were, strictly speaking, day terrors, as she slept not at night, but during the day.

She had mentioned it to Grissom once, years and years and years ago, almost flippantly.

"Do you want to sleep with me?" She had asked.

There had been nothing sexual about the invitation – she had only thought of the inevitable nightmares and how it would be to have him there to hold her after the night sweats and screaming to tell her it was just a nightmare, a dream, and that she was safe and no one and nothing was going to hurt her.

However, at this moment, it was Gil Grissom who worried her.

His movements were more hesitant than usual, as if something had propelled him into a state of perpetual slow motion. His eyes never met hers as he brushed up all the broken glass and carefully dumped it into a double-bagged trash bag.

"I think I got most of it." Then he said, with a note of care and caution in his voice, "but you shouldn't be walking in here with bare feet for a while."

She stepped back to let him pass. As he did so, she snagged one of his burnt hands.

It was red and slightly tender to the touch.

"It's nothing," he protested as he tried to extract it from her grasp.

She shook her head and proceeded to lead him, half-protesting, down the hall to the bathroom.

"Sit," she commanded pointing to the toilet. Grissom seemed to know better than to argue with her when she used that particular tone.

So he relented and allowed her to guide both of his injured hands under the cool water.

He decided to take this opportunity to observe Sara up close.

Sara was not conventionally beautiful, not in the way women like Catherine were, but Sara exuded a presence Grissom had always found irresistible.

He smiled faintly, despite the ache in his hands, as he watched her chew on her lower lip in the exact same way she did when she was intently focused on something.

He had never quite noticed that look directed at him before.

Although if he had been paying closer attention, he probably would have known that she gave him that look perhaps a bit more often than she should have.

"Thank you," Grissom said sincerely, as Sara secured the last piece of tape around the bandage, securing the gauze into place after she had liberally anointed both of his hands with burn cream.

"Anything else hurt?" She asked giving him a slight smile.

He thought it would sound too melodramatic to say, "my heart" so he said nothing.

"I suppose tea is out of the question then," she continued, peering up at him from where she was kneeling.

She hadn't quite let go of his hands yet, suddenly remembering a moment eerily familiar to this one, but with their roles reversed.

He had seemed to care then, the least she could do was show him that same kind of care in return.

As she still cradled his hands in hers, she mused that it had never ceased to amaze her that for a man of his size, who worked with his hands in not always the most delicate of situations, that his skin was so surprisingly soft.

It was the same sort of softness that she remembered from the day before when he had pressed his palm against the back of her hand and curled his fingers around the space between her thumb and forefinger.

This time, however, there was a slight measure of stiffness in the way he held his fingers, as if he wasn't entirely relaxed.

"Why don't we take this to the living room," she offered, taking his elbow and helping him up this time.

God, he felt old, Grissom sighed heavily to himself as he followed Sara back down the hall.

His hands felt strangely bereft at the loss of her touch.

"Besides," she said in a teasing sort of tone, hoping to lighten the mood a little. "You didn't just come here to break into my apartment, criticize my – or rather Greg's - taste in music, and keep me from having a well-deserved hot bath."

"No," he replied simply as they both unconsciously took up the same positions they had held the day before – she in the chair and he on the sofa.

He was perched a little too close to the edge of the cushions to be entirely comfortable.

Grissom hadn't come for the sake of comfort.

Sara's next question did not put him any more at ease.

"Then why are you here?" She asked. "We both know that you're not one to make social calls for purely social reasons. Unless this is all part of some new touchy-feely departmental policy I wasn't aware of."

He smiled a soft, sad sort of smile and placed a hand on top of a box on her coffee table. "Redecorating?" He asked.

"More like relocating," she answered, all amusement gone from her voice.

"So that would explain this then," he said, drawing the white envelope he had found on his doorstep from out of his jacket pocket.

Sara sighed heavily.

The time for the truth had come.

"Yes."

When Grissom did not seem to be satisfied by her answer, she continued hesitantly.

"You remember Jack Peters from the San Francisco crime lab?"

"Vaguely."

Grissom had met the man in passing when he had come up to San Francisco to provide his entomological expertise to a case that the local department had been having trouble puzzling out.

He hadn't remembered much of the trip. San Fran just hadn't felt the same without Sara there.

It was there, after all, that they had first met all those years ago.

Now that he thought about it, this wasn't the way he had pictured their relationship turning out -- with the two of them practically more like strangers than when the two of them had originally met.

Sara had come up to him after one of his obligatory lectures and began asking a litany of rather incisive questions. She had seemed so bright and engaging -- even captivating -- even then.

She had certainly not lost any of her charms. The intervening years had not only deepened his attraction for her, but dare he even admit it to himself, his feelings for her as well.

He had tried for years to push them (and her) aside, thinking that they would just fade with time and he could happily go back to the misanthropic and almost monastic existence in which he had spent most of his life. Perhaps he had not exactly been happy in that Spartan sort of being, but he had been content in his work, in what he could accomplish with his mind, in all the things he knew.

This thing with Sara always threw him for a loop.

He was never quite sure what to do around her.

He wondered if this awkwardness was what he had missed out on when he was younger and was more interested in dissecting the dead things that washed up onshore than girls.

Yet, with this awkwardness with Sara, there was also this undeniable connection.

In some ways, they knew each other so well and in other ways not at all.

Paradox.

That was the best word to describe his relationship with Sara.

It was a paradox.

Grissom had been so lost in his own musings, that he missed hearing Sara calling his name.

Only her light touch on his arm succeeded in bringing him out of his revelry.

"You disappeared there for a second," Sara said gently, concern in her voice.

"Sorry," he apologized hurriedly. "You were talking about Jack Peters."

Sara nodded and continued, "Yes. Well, he was promoted to deputy director a few years back. He's been begging me to come back and work for him in San Fran ever since." She paused and then admitted, "You know, he wasn't that happy when I left to come to Vegas."

Something that looked remarkably like the faint hint of jealousy clouded Grissom's face.

"Oh, no, nothing like that," she reassured him. "I wasn't his type. Hell, I wasn't even a member of his gender of choice," she laughed. "He was more upset that I was leaving the lab for you than anything else. Thought it wasn't the best of reasons to go."

Her reasons to go –

Something Sara had said a few weeks before suddenly resurfaced in Grissom's memory.

She had sat there in his office and ever so nonchalantly practically confessed that he had been the reason she had come to Vegas.

At first, he had taken her comments to mean that she had come here to work with him – and the team, too, of course. The Las Vegas Crime Lab wasn't number two in the country without good reason after all. A post there was quite the coveted position.

He had to revise his assumptions after she had made the comment that he had always been "more than a boss" to her.

He had wanted to say something after that, but before he could say anything, before he could even get his head around the possibilities of what she was trying to tell him, she had vanished.

Neither of them had spoken of the incident since.

"So, Jack's been hounding me," Sara continued, seemingly oblivious to Grissom's train of thought. "I guess his persistence paid off. There were only so many times I could say 'no,' before I felt I had to say 'yes.'"

She stopped, noticing that Grissom was no longer looking at her, but rather at his hands, which she couldn't know felt very empty to him at this moment.

But Sara had to get it out, all of it out. She had to.

"I know Grave is short-staffed right now, so I will stay on until you can find and orientate my replacement."

Replacement? Grissom wondered. How was there any possible way for him to replace Sara?

Sure, he could hire another CSI. There was always a large pool of incredibly acceptable candidates to choose from to fill any open position. The only reason night's had been short wasn't for a dearth of applicants, but for the slight, yet rather looming, problem of a lack of governmental funding.

Yes, hiring a competent CSI would be no trouble at all.

But replacing Sara? That was impossible.

Of course, he had never told her that either.

Chalk that one up to yet another thing Gil Grissom didn't have the guts to say to the one person who meant more to him than anything – his work -- his bugs -- his quiet, cloistered existence.

He took a deep breath – it was now or never, he reasoned.

She had been honest with him when she had told him about her family. The least he could do was let her in to see that he, too, had secrets and fears and scars that would never quite heal.

"Sara –"

All the air seemed to leave the room with those two syllables.

Never in all of her life had Sara heard her name spoken with such feeling. She almost decided to not continue to say what she knew in her heart that she needed to tell him.

"It's time, Grissom. It's been time for a long time now."

Grissom shook his head in protest. "I know you've been unhappy, Sara. And I know that lately I haven't been the friend you deserve, but I had never thought it had come to this."

"It's just better for everyone if I just go."

Not for me, he thought, but instead he said, "If this has anything to do with Ecklie…"

She abruptly cut him off. "This has nothing to do with Ecklie. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction."

It seemed that they both shared the same deep dislike for the lab's deputy director.

The thought made Grissom's lips twitch slightly.

It had been incredibly satisfying to lay down the law with Conrad. He wondered if Sara had felt equally pleased at telling off the incompetent ass herself.

Boy, would he have liked to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting. Perhaps someday she would tell him exactly what she had said that had made Ecklie so irate.

Right now though that didn't matter.

Right now he wanted so desperately to know why Sara felt so strongly that she had to leave.

"Then why?" he asked, braving a look up at her. Their eyes met for a moment, before she turned away.

"Does it matter?"

Disregarding the fact that his right hand still ached, he reached out and covered the one of hers that lay limp in her lap with his own. He wanted her to know he was serious about this.

"It does to me."

Sara laughed, not a sweet happy sort of laugh that brightened up her whole face, but of the sad sort of variety that made her look all the more dejected.

"This is the second time in half as many days you've said those words to me," she said resignedly. "I know you want answers, Grissom. But you know as well as I do that sometimes you just don't get them. And sometimes you just have to live with that fact."

"I don't want to have to live with that."

"Tough," she said, jerking her hand free and retreating to her desk where she started piling more books into an open box.

A wordless silence stretched on between them as neither of them spoke, leaving the only sound in the room that of the books thumping noisily against each other.

Then even that stopped.

Grissom looked up from his determined contemplation of his shoes and hazarded a look at Sara.

She stood there frozen, a thick volume in her hand -- a very familiar thick volume -- the book on entomology that he had given her for Christmas a few years back.

After a moment, she began turning it over and over in her hands.

"You know the guys were a little disappointed that you hadn't given them anything for Christmas," she said as she smiled a wisp of a smile, but the smile was gone as quick as it had come as she opened the front cover.

The front piece was blank.

"You never inscribed it."

"I wasn't quite sure what to say," he answered truthfully.

She gave him a disbelieving look. "You? The man who has an appropriate quote for every situation?"

"I didn't want them to be someone else's words. I wanted them to be mine."

There was something almost endearing about that, but that didn't change the fact that the page was still empty.

"And you didn't know what to say," she said sadly, coming to terms with the fact that this was how their relationship had always been and probably would always be like.

"No, just not how to say it."

It was a moment of absolute honesty and Sara recognized it as such. The least she could do was be absolutely honest with him. She reverently replaced one of the few gifts Grissom had ever given her on her desk and returned to her seat.

"Catherine stopped by last night," Sara said simply as if that might explain everything.

Of course, she knew and he knew that nothing between the two of them was ever going to be that easy.

Grissom wanted to ask a thousand different questions, but he said nothing, knowing that he had to let Sara tell it her in own way.

"She said you 'had words' with Ecklie."

"They weren't exactly words, Sara," he countered. "I just wanted to make sure he was completely clear on some things. I guess I should have made sure you and I were clear on those things first."

"We are clear," Sara replied. "You think I am a good criminalist –"

"No, I think you are a great criminalist, Sara."

"And that the lab needs me," she finished. "Grissom, if this is going to be another of those stay for the good of the lab speeches, you can save it. I've already heard it from you."

"Actually, that's not what I said," he said, peering into her face, a patient, knowing sort of look on his features, that she recognized as one of those "I'm going to drop the bombshell that is going to make everything make sense at last" sort of looks.

"But Catherine –" Sara protested.

"Sometimes both you and Catherine only hear what you expect to hear."

Sara didn't feel that that particular comparison was entirely true or fair, but she wasn't about to start an argument with Grissom when he seemed to be in the middle of saying something that was important to him.

Although, as the moments ticked on, he didn't seem to be in any hurry to continue.

"So what did you say?" Her throat seemed to catch on the words.

"Sara –"

"What did you say?" She asked again, feeling more nervous than she could remember ever having felt in her life.

"I told Ecklie I needed you."

"I don't see…" She began, still confused.

"Not the lab, Sara. I need you."

"I don't understand."

Grissom took a deep breath and then explained, "I didn't ask you to come to Vegas because the lab needed you. I didn't ask you to stay because the labneeded you, not the first time when I offered you the position here, nor after you had put in for that leave of absence."

He stopped there.

Sara wondered if he thought he had said too much and regretted it.

She wasn't quite sure herself where this conversation was going.

This sort of openness was uncharted territory for both of them. She knew this had to be even harder on Grissom, than it was for her. She knew he was an infinitely private man.

It wasn't that he didn't feel; he did, just as much as the rest of them; maybe even more so. He just wasn't the sort of person to share those feelings with just anyone.

That he was choosing to share them so openly with her now was a sign of just how much he trusted her.

Although Sara didn't want to push him, she could barely breathe, so she settled on a half-formed quizzical sort of, "Oh?"

"Yes," was all he replied.

He was staring down at his hands again and had taken to absentmindedly fiddling with the edges of the tape that held the gauze covering secure over the burn on his left hand. He seemed to be getting up the nerve to say what he had come all the way straight over to Sara's to say.

When he finally did speak, his voice was strangely even, as if he were desperately trying to retain some slight measure of control over it.

"I'm not asking you to stay now because the lab needs you. Sara, Honey, look at me."

Sara hadn't realized how engrossed she had become in watching Grissom's hands. Her eyes flicked up to his.

It had grown harder and harder over the past few years to look him full in the face without the mask of anger or fight to hide behind. She had been too afraid to see his disappointment -- or her own -- there.

This time his dark blue eyes didn't seem to be harboring any signs of disappointment.

Instead, they crinkled at the edges with a sort of verity and vulnerability that she had not seen there in a long time.

"I –" Grissom began, his eyes never leaving hers.

Sara put a hand to his lips. As much as it hurt to do it, she had to.

"Don't," she said softly. "Please don't."

"Sara –"

His voice was almost a plea.

She still shook her head and stumbled to her feet as she stammered, "I can't. I can't play this game anymore."

Grissom caught her hand and held it fast.

"What game?"

"You're hot one moment, cold the next. Grissom, I never know where I stand with you. And I'm not going to let you risk your job for me either."

"Is that what this is all about?" He asked, just beginning to understand why she had done what she had one. "Sara, that's my choice."

"No!" She almost shouted. "I know how important your career is to you. Believe me, you have made abundantly -- and repeatedly -- clear that I wasn't worth the risk."

Sara was starting to feel all the old hurt and anger and frustration from over the past few years rise up again inside of her.

"I never said –"

"You don't have to lie. I was there."

Grissom was horribly confused.

It seemed as if everything that could go wrong, had gone wrong. He had come to ask her to stay and it seemed that all he was succeeding in doing was driving her further away.

He uttered a very bewildered, "What?"

"Lurie."

The sound of that name on her lips struck him as if the word had been an actual physical blow.

That name brought with it a flash of memories.

The bathroom.

The body in the bathroom.

The woman who bore such an uncanny resemblance to Sara that even seeing her alive and breathing on Debbie Marlin's front lawn had not lessened the horrible certainty that it was her – it was Sara, his Sara, posed on the floor.

Sara murdered.

It hadn't just been thoughts of Debbie – vibrant, beautiful, engaging Debbie -- that had plagued him during the case.

No, in everywhere he looked, in everything he touched, in everything he felt, Sara had haunted him, too.

Those were the moments, the images, that had replayed themselves over and over again in his worst nightmares.

Sara dead.

Sara gone.

It wasn't until Sara – the very real and present Sara - said, "I was there --" that Grissom was able to pull himself back into the present. His eyes began to widen in horror as she continued. "In the observation room while you and Brass interrogated Lurie."

Vincent Lurie – that man had almost frightened him more than any other killer Grissom had ever met, because for the first time in his career, Gil Grissom saw himself in a suspect.

They were so alike, he and the good doctor – two middle-aged men who were married to their work, who felt nothing and touched no one except through a protective layer of latex. They had both had their perfectly anesthetized worlds turned upside down and inside out by the presence of a beautiful woman who showed them everything they had been missing in this life.

Neither man, however, had gotten their happy ending.

Lurie had loved and lost and Grissom, well he had just lost.

"That wasn't how I would have wanted you to find out," he said, regret ringing in his voice.

"Find out what? That I wasn't alone in feeling the way I did?" She asked, the hurt plain in her voice. "It didn't matter. It doesn't matter, because in the end you 'couldn't do it.' Those were your words, Grissom, not mine. You couldn't do it."

"Did you ever stop to think for one moment that the reason I couldn't do it had absolutely nothing to do with you?" Grissom asked, something akin to anguish on his face. "Sara, I am not a young man, nor a particularly attractive man."

Her lips moved to protest, but he shook his head to indicate that he needed to finish saying what he needed to say without interruption.

"I'm not good with people. And I'm certainly not good at relationships. I've never been good at relationships. I'm not good with feelings. I am exactly as you said I am, 'emotionally unavailable.' You deserve better Sara – more."

"I only ever wanted you."

"For now," he conceded. "But someday all of those faults that you are so willing to overlook will still be there and then they will matter and –"

Grissom pulled off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

Telling Sara the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth had proven a lot harder than he had ever imagined, but she deserved it, no matter how hard it was for him to say the words.

"You were scared." Sara's words weren't a question. Neither was her "You still are."

He nodded with his eyes still closed as he tried to regain some measure of equilibrium.

"From the moment I met you, you turned my world of order into one of chaos. You don't know how scary that can be."

"I can imagine," she replied with an understanding half-smile.

Grissom rose.

Sara thought for a moment that he was going to leave, that this was going to be their real good-bye, the one not on display for everyone else to see.

Instead, he walked over to her desk, picked up the entomology book he had given her, flipped it open and after retrieving a pen from his pocket, began to write.

When he had finished, he placed the heavy volume in Sara's lap and said, "But not half as scary as the thought of loosing you for good."

This time he did move towards the door. He paused, his hand hovering just over the doorknob.

"I guess you were right. By the time I figured it out it was too late."

He closed the door wordlessly behind him, leaving only the image of his slumped shoulders and sad eyes.

Sara slowly opened the book to read in the neat, orderly quintessentially

Grissom-like hand the words:

I need you.

I'm asking you to stay because I need you.

- Gil

End Notes:

Thank you for taking the time out to read and review.

While compliments are always welcome, constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns or wish to be notified about the release of the next or further installments, email the author at or visit kadhfanfiction.