"Rick? Hi, it's Sara."
"Hey, Sara, what's up?" Warrick sat up in his bed, trying to shake the cobwebs from his head. He had barely been asleep an hour when the phone woke him.
Sara realized she had woken him, and bit back a curse, but she had been driving around the last hour and had no other leads. "I'm sorry, I just didn't know who to call."
The worried, almost scared, note in Sara's voice snapped him completely awake. "Hey, no problem," he soothed. "Is something wrong? Are you ok?"
"Yeah, no, I mean..." she stopped, drew a breath, and started again. "It's Catherine. She... you know she's been acting weird lately, and well, she came over this morning to talk." Her sigh of frustration carried clearly over the line to Warrick. "But she acted even weirder and left, and now... I can't find her. I checked her house, work, a couple of bars she's gone to... Do you have any idea where she might go if she's, I dunno, freaking out?"
Warrick frowned, very concerned now. Usually if Catherine had a problem, she would deal with it or come to a friend for help, usually him. "I don't know. Damn!"
"Warrick? Where did Catherine... dance?"
"You think she might have gone back to her old strip club?' he asked, incredulous. He never would have even considered that.
"I dunno. It's just a hunch."
"On the Strip. Place called "Showtime."
"Yeah, I've seen it. Thanks."
"Sara? Do you want me to go?"
"No, I'm the one who needs to talk to her. I'll call when I find her. Thanks, Rick."
xxx xxx xxx
The doorman looked her up and down as he took her cover, taking in every inch and leering at her. Sara immediately wanted to take a shower, but instead she forced herself to smile past the bile rising in her throat and asked him if another woman had been in today. The expression on his face got even more dirty, something Sara would have not thought possible a second before, as he nodded his head and gestured toward the curtain covering the entrance. "Yup, it's ladies night or something." Sara just nodded, afraid to try to form words the way her stomach was clenching. "You girls have fun,' he said as she passed him, and she clamped down on the urge to hit him, hard. Getting arrested for assault was not a good idea, regardless of how good it would feel.
Sara blinked the spots out of her eyes as she adjusted to the dark, smoky interior of the club, spotting Catherine's silhouette easily in the mostly empty club. She was leaned back in a large, soft chair, her hand lightly holding a glass that she raised to her lips every few moments. She was right up front, close to the stage, but the strippers seemed to be ignoring her and catering to the other, male, customers. Sara took a quick detour to let Warrick know she had found Catherine before she slid into the chair beside her, noting the three empty highballs on the table as well as Catherine's 100-yard stare.
"Hey," she said, watching the dancer closest to them grind out-of-time to the music before swinging around a pole. As if noticing her interest, the stripper moved closer and began a set of more intricate moves, none of which Sara found particularly interesting or sexy.
Catherine hadn't said a word, hadn't even looked her way, and Sara tried not to be too obvious as she snuck glances at her, keeping her attention on the stripper for the most part. "You want me to buy you a lap dance?" she asked finally, the humor sounded off even to her ears. Catherine swiveled her head to Sara, her eyes unreadable, before turning back to the stage. The waitress appeared beside her, and she nodded her head toward Catherine's empty glasses before ordering a beer for herself.
As she paid the waitress, she slipped another twenty into her hand, holding it up for the dancer before sliding it under the elastic of her g-string. "I could never have done this," she mused her eyes still trained on the dancer, who looked pretty under the caked, unflattering stage make-up.
"You'd be surprised what you can do when you have to." Catherine stunned her by answering, and Sara bit back a sigh of relief. "When you have no choice. And," she began with a sideways glance at Sara's tall frame, "you wouldn't have done half bad."
Sara sniffed in amusement at that as she pictured her graceless body trying to dance and look sexy. "Yea... no. I would never be able to do it."
"It doesn't really take talent,' Catherine countered, her tone conversational.
"It's not the talent. I wouldn't have the nerve... the courage... to get up there. "
"If you need to eat, a place to live, you could do it... trust me." Catherine knew Sara Sidle; if she put her mind to something, she couldn't imagine her failing to do it.
"I would've starved, lived on the street, and died young." This was said in a flat, low tone, with a certainty that surprised Catherine, and she looked more closely at the hard, set features of the younger woman.
"I don't think so. You do what you have to do." It was a simple statement that reflected her survival instinct, Catherine knew, but she also knew that it was true, at least for her. She would always do what she needed to do to survive and protect herself and Lindsey; it was one of the absolutes she lived by. "You want to know the secret?" Catherine asked quietly, continuing before Sara could reply. "A snort of coke will keep you on your feet and moving so fast you don't even see the people, really, except as disembodied hands holding bills. Dulled the pain of the shoes, insulated you from the creepy looks, and gave you the nerve to go back out there, night after night."
Catherine was surprised by her admission, and even more surprised at how the straight-laced Sara seemed to take it in stride, nodding in quiet agreement and understanding. "Funny, at times I can see you doing this, and other times I can't imagine it. So right and so wrong for you. all that the same time." Sara tilted her beer to show the waitress she needed another.
"It was better than a lot of my other options," Catherine replied, a little coldly. "And it wasn't like I had someone to pay my Harvard tuition."
Sara winced a little at the barb, and answered, in an absolute monotone, "Yeah, my life has just been perfect." Catherine swung to stare at Sara closely, noticing a haunted look in Sara's dark eyes.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean..."
"It's ok," Sara said, her words comforting except for the distant, sad expression that spoke of a deep hurt. She was years and miles away, Catherine realized. Slowly, Sara seemed to return to the present,. Taking a sip of her beer, she said, "You've always made the tough choices and never apologized. That's... admirable. Not... everyone can do that. Not everyone is that strong."
Sara had Catherine's full attention now, but she was back to watching the dancers. What is she trying to say? Is she trying to say something about us, or her... It struck Catherine then that she knew so little about her brunette co-worker, that she never even knew how she had met Grissom or where she had grown up. I know her resume, I know her at work, and I've learned a few things in the last two months, but I really don't know her at all.
Sara's eyes slid over, seeing Catherine watching her intensely, and she said in her deliberately bland voice, "Why did you kiss me?" The diversion worked; Catherine flopped back in her chair as if her skeleton had suddenly given way and she groped blindly for her drink.
"Because it's all I've been able to think about all week." Now it was Sara's turn to swing around and stare at her, in that quiet way she has of showing her surprise. The music droned on in the background, and dancers moved around the stage, but in the bubble surrounding them, everything seemed to have stopped. Until Sara spoke again, shattering the stillness.
"So why did you leave?"
Sara's lips, warm, uninvolved, that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, she doesn't want this, the overwhelming need to get away... "I may not have a lot of experience with women, but I know when someone is responding to a kiss," she replied coldly as she rose from her seat. "You weren't." She saw Sara open her mouth to say something, but she cut her off. "There's no explanation needed – I understand." With that, she headed toward the back entrance with as much dignity as she could muster, squeezing her eyes against the tears that threatened.
Sara caught up with her in the alley as she tried to blink her tears away to find her SUV. "Catherine... hey." Sara put a cautious hand on Catherine's shoulder, feeling the shaking of her slight frame under her fingertips. She stepped around so she was standing in front of the shorter blonde, both hands coming up to cup her face, raising one set of reddened eyes to her own. "Hey," she breathed softly, comfortingly, as she brushed her lips across Catherine's forehead, then the tip of her nose,, and then her lips.