Oh, and I had to type this entire chapter one-handed due to a very painful injury of my left hand, so please excuse any stupid spelling errors.
Thanks a bunch. Enjoy and please review.
Chapter Ten: Eclipse
No one knew where Nick was. He had not shown up for work. He was not answering his cell. Grissom had sent Warrick by his house. His truck had been parked in the driveway but he had not been there. The team had had been driven into a panic. Especially Sara.
She had been sitting in the break room since the beginning of shift. Her coffee was quickly growing cold but she didn't care. She didn't know why she had even bothered pouring it anyway. She couldn't shake the feeling that Nick's unorthodox disappearance was somehow her fault. After all, she had left him under some pretty uncertain circumstances.
He had told her he loved her.
Nick Stokes was in love with her, Sara Sidle.
The thought made her head spin, her stomach ache. It was all too much to bear. She didn't know what to think anymore.
She was losing grip, losing control of her entire being.
She did it silently though, sitting alone in the break room, brooding over the preceding day's events.
And then they had found Nick's letter and what was left of her world shattered.
Nick loved her.
He loved her.
And he was resigning, moving back to Dallas.
She felt her heart pounding in her chest. It was so damn loud. How was it that she was the only one able to hear it? It beat faster and faster, hammering against her chest as Grissom broke the news to her, echoing through her mind. Grissom reached for her hand but she pulled away.
She felt nauseous.
She felt hollow.
Nick was leaving. Her Nicky. The one person who had understood what she was going through. The person who had listened to her. The person who had held her in his arms as she cried out all the pain and fear she had been harboring for almost three months. The person who had fixed her.
He had fixed her, and yet he had left her feeling so broken inside.
She looked back up to meet Grissom's eyes, those wounded eyes. Could they really be more wounded than her own, though? Unlikely.
He withdrew his hand and left her sitting alone at the break room table.
She didn't eat that night. She just pushed the food around on the plate with her fork as Grissom sat watching her. He finally stood up and took their untouched meals to the garbage can, where he dumped them, and Sara went to take a shower. It was a cold shower. It made the skin on her legs spring up into gooseflesh, but she didn't care; she was not in the mood for a warm shower.
By the time Sara had dried off and slipped into her pajamas, Grissom was already in bed. She tiptoed across the cold tile of the bathroom and into the hallway, walking past the open bedroom door to the living room. She climbed onto the sofa and curled up into a ball.
A solitary tear escaped the barriers she had been working to sustain all night long. It was closely followed by another. And then another. She didn't know what exactly she was crying for. Perhaps it was the overall anxiety of a stressful day. Perhaps it was the intense sensation of loss that had overwhelmed her. She didn't really know. All she did know was that the tears began flowing with such vigor that her whole body started trembling.
Sara clutched her legs tighter to her chest and buried her head in her knees. She remained sobbing in a fetal position for close to three hours before the tears finally subsided and she was left with nothing but tear-streaked cheeks and a faint hiccupping sensation. Her eyes stung and her eyelids were strangely stiff, so she stared at the wall through the darkness until she fell asleep, almost too scared to even close her eyes.
When Sara woke, the first thing she noticed was that the brightness of the sunlight pouring in through the open window stung her eyes. The second was that it was warm, warmer than it had been when she had fallen asleep. She sat up on the couch groggily, the fleece blanket that had miraculously appeared on top of her sometime during the night falling to her waist.
The third thought that struck her was that Nick was gone, or soon to be gone, and she felt fresh tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
She quickly dabbed the moisture from her eyes and stood up, letting the blanket fall to the floor beside her. The house was unnaturally quiet. She wandered from room to room in search of Grissom but could not find him anywhere. She did not know where he could possibly be. It was his day off, so he wouldn't be at the lab and he wasn't too keen on the social scene.
She trudged into the kitchen and found a note written for her on the table.
Sara, it read. Don't bother coming in today. I'm taking your shift. Get some rest. Grissom.
Apparently he was at the lab.
She sighed and wandered back into the living room, sitting down on the edge of the sofa. Get some rest. Yeah, right. Like that was feasible. Her mind was racing. Her heart was pounding. Her legs felt numb.
There was no way in hell she would be getting any rest.
How could she when her world had been turned upside down so abruptly? She had had no warning whatsoever. She just showed up at work one day to find that her best friend – the man who had helped her through all the crap her life seemed to consist of lately, the man she had been falling deeper and deeper in love with for the better part of the past month, the man who had confessed his love for her only the night before – was leaving. For good.
The sun might as well have been blotted out of the sky.
Losing Nick was like having to deal with her own personal eclipse.
You never know what you've got until it's gone. How many times had she heard that platitude? And yet it had taken until now for the depth of its meaning to sink in.
Sara needed Nick. She loved him. And if she had only realized that sooner, she might have been able to fix things.
She could be lying in his arms right now.
Sara's eyes fluttered closed at the memory of his arms wrapped around her waist as she sobbed into his neck, the way his heady scent had overwhelmed her.
She stood up and grabbed her coat from where it lay on the edge of the couch. She shrugged into it and stuffed her keys into her pocket, locking the door to the townhouse behind her.
She drove without knowing where she was going. She drove to forget but only ended up remembering when she found herself outside of Nick's house. His truck was still parked in the driveway but there were no lights on and there was an altogether empty feeling about the place. Then again, Sara couldn't be altogether sure if the feeling was coming more from the house or herself.
Sara put the car in park and unbuckled. She exited the vehicle as if in a daze. She wasn't sure of what she was doing, but she locked the car door and began walking slowly up the front walk to the door. It was locked, of course, but she rattled the doorknob nonetheless. It still didn't give way and she began pounding ruthlessly on the wooden surface until it swung open to reveal a very pissed off looking Nick.