Grissom's tired and gentle eyes caressed her sleeping face as the early Saturday morning sun seeped in through the blinds, enveloping them in a golden warmth.
God, he had missed her while he was away.
How she had ever, in a million years, thought his sabbatical was meant as an escape from her - he couldn't fathom.
If anything, she was the one and only thing he was absolutely certain about.
Once he had let her in, truly let her in, nothing else really mattered. Not the job. Not his position as supervisor. Not his education. Not even his cockroaches and rare butterfly collection.
No, Sara's love opened his eyes to a whole new world of possibility and emotion and feeling.
He had noticed other women before, sure. He was a man after all. Not only was he a man, he was a man living in Sin City, at that. A city with no shortage of beautiful women in scantily clad outfits, shaking any part of their body your eyes could reach. He'd been intrigued by the female form long before moving to Nevada, still.
Gil Grissom, although socially awkward and living in a home where hardly any words were ever spoken, grew up in California. Home to the tanned and toned 'beach babe', and he certainly didn't fail to notice how beautiful women could be, even at a young age.
His first real crush, if he remembered correctly, was his 8th grade teacher, Miss Connolly. She was a tiny little thing with long, pin straight mousy brown hair and she always wore a skirt. She couldn't have been bigger than 5'4" and 115lb, and her voice was as soft as you'd expect for a woman of her size and stature. He couldn't remember why he found himself so infatuated with her, but he vividly remembered that was the first time he really.. explored his body's physical reaction to a pleasing looking woman.
Although he was like any pubescent boy dealing with raging hormones and impulses through middle and high-school, he never dated. Partly, because he was consumed with school work and house work to assist his mother, but mostly because he was a ghost in school. He never found the nerve to actually ask a girl out, let alone speak to one. The idea was so foreign to him, he had always preferred to watch, rather than participate. Besides, he figured the girls at his high-school likely wouldn't be impressed by his... hobbies. Bugs and animal autopsies weren't exactly dripping with sex appeal.
By the time he had gotten to college, he had come into his own a bit more, and recognized he was surrounded by people who appreciated academics and found he had more to talk about with students.. specifically the female students in his biology classes.
He wasn't naive to the concept that he was good looking. His mother, Betty, had always told him his blue eyes would get him into trouble one day.
In college he dated a senior girl named Caroline. His first date, his first kiss, his first everything. It lasted a year before she graduated and, as these things go, their relationship faded.
With Caroline, though, he discovered the woman's body through more than an anatomy textbook or one of the racy magazines he would hide behind his bed. She had been patient with him, and had been a good teacher.
There had been others in his early years, but nothing worth writing home about. Women, in general, were beautiful creatures.. but still, a mystery to him.
Hormonal, complicated, passionate beings that quite honestly, frightened him.
Sex was just that to him, sex.
It was merely a physical connection with another human being to release pent up tension and chemicals. It felt good. Really good. But often times, it involved an emotional connection for the women he had been involved with and that was the part he didn't understand. He had apparently ruined several relationships with sexual partners because he didn't call them the next day, or didn't bring flowers, or didn't think it necessary to visit her family over Christmas break. He never understood it. Why couldn't sex just be that? Sex.
Why did sex always have to involve some kind of 'love' or attentiveness?
After a while, and a couple drinks thrown in his face, he had decided that while coitus with a woman was immensely pleasurable, his hand was just as good and far less complicated.. and didn't require constant reassurances and emotion. Emotions he just figured he didn't have.
Maybe it was because he had mostly grown up without a father, or maybe it was because his brain just worked differently.. but he wasn't good at relationships. He had never been a people person.
He wouldn't call himself selfish, necessarily.. but self consumed? Yes. Gil often found himself consumed by his own mind and lost in his own train of thought, and while he didn't mean it to, he knew it confused people. He knew he came off as aloof and insensitive. He really wasn't. He did care, and he did have feelings... they were just easier to ignore.
The only thing that ever made sense to him, complete sense, was science. You couldn't fool science. Science didn't change on a day to day basis due to hormonal shifts or miscommunications. Science didn't expect flowers or commitment or a call back.
By the time he knew it, he was in his early forties, living alone in the desert, content with his concrete walls and his routine and his bugs and his hand. At least, that was the lie he was telling himself.
Sara, she was something else.
He had noticed immediately, from the moment she introduced herself to him, that she was beautiful.
Not the kind of beautiful you'd necessarily find on the beach in California. Not in a gentle, delicate way like his 8th grade teacher was either. Certainly not the kind of skanky beautiful you had to pay to see at a strip club down town.
No, she was different. She had always been different.
The day he had met her, he remembered her hair had been much longer. She wore a messy pony tale with her unruly curls falling around her face as if she had rolled out of bed, still slightly hungover, and rushed to his seminar. She wore sneakers, jeans and a t-shirt. It was so simple. She was just so simple.
She was thin, too. She wasn't lusciously curvy like all of the models in the magazines or the attention seeking tourists that walk the streets of Vegas. She was like a tree. Straight lined, and so very tall. She was almost childlike in the way she carried herself, and he remembered wondering if that was for a reason. She sat in the auditorium with a leg crossed under her, and chewed on her pen like a teenager. He wondered if she wore a simple t-shirt and a pony tale and running shoes because she was stuck in her childhood somehow.
It wasn't until much later that he realized she was the furthest thing from childish - her mind was brilliant but her body had grown up too quickly and her heart was still that innocent 12 year old she subconsciously mourned and wished she could be.
She wasn't elegant. She wasn't proper or necessarily sensual. She didn't ooze sex appeal. She was goofy, and full of life. Lanky and clumsy and mouthy. She was clearly wired on black coffee and chocolate croissants, and she spoke a million miles a minute. She was wildly intelligent, like some kind of prodigy. She knew so much about so many things, and could solve a math equation in her head faster then anyone else he knew. She wasn't easily grossed out, either, as he quickly learned she worked in his field and dealt with death and decomp as often as he did.
As beautiful as she was, she wasn't the kind of woman he would have normally noticed in the street or at a coffee shop, but she captivated him nonetheless. She was intoxicating.
Still, although she seemed different than any of the women he has spent any amount of time with, he didn't indulge himself. For starters, her age. He was 41 when they met, and she was barely 26.
But mostly, something about her, despite her bright gap toothed smile and energetic personality, seemed broken and haunted and he knew he wasn't in a position to stick around after intimacy. She was beautiful, but he didn't want her baggage.
There was no denying the odd, unexplainable chemistry they had, though. They shared a few meals while he was in the Bay, and she showed him around her town, and made her attraction to him very well known.. but he just couldn't. No matter how badly he wanted to, and no matter how uncomfortable the proof of his desire was straining against his jeans, he couldn't follow through. In hindsight now, he's glad he didn't, because that's all it would have been. Sex.
For some reason, as if he were some kind of sucker for pain, he invited her to Vegas to help him. The chemistry and temptation continued once she moved to his team, but by that time he has become an expert in locking away his desires and impulses.
He had hurt her, he knew that. He'd lead her on when his resolve was particularly weak, and then left her strung out to dry when he got cold feet.
For some reason though, while pushing her away for years, he had simultaneously claimed her and felt threatened by anyone else who showed interest in her. Like that moron of a paramedic, or geeky Greg, even if he knew the kid never stood a chance. He didn't know why it bothered him so much. He had never so much as touched her, more than her hands, anyways. But he felt this uncontrollable draw to her and it was threatening to bubble over at any moment.
It was more than just lust, too. It was so much more than a physical attraction. While he couldn't deny he was painfully attracted to her physically there was also this deeper, genuine emotional affection for her he couldn't pin point. He wanted more than just sex, more than just the release, and that's what scared him. He couldn't explain it, but she consumed him. Her passion and her temper turned him on to no end, but her empathy and her contagious laugh and her kind eyes.. they made his chest swell and made his knees weak. He wanted to just hold her, and bury his face in her hair and feel her shoulder blades under his finger tips and wipe her tears and thrust into her softly, gently, and watch her quiver underneath him. He wanted to hear his full name on her lips.
Needless to say, he finally gave in to himself, and to her.
Not in a pitiful way, either.
On the outset, the night they came together the first time wasn't necessarily romantic or full of emotion. It was purely lustful. Years of suppressed sexual tension and physical attraction came to a head and neither of them wanted to deny it or fight it anymore. Simply, neither of them could. She would poke fun at him, still to this day, at how primal he had looked when she opened her apartment door.
The first time, it was honestly and truthfully just sex. Amazing, intense and visceral sex. It was uncomplicated, and she knew him. She knew him so well that she reassured him after, from her bathroom, that it didn't have to mean anything and they could just pretend it didn't happen.
But the thing was, laying in her bed in the delicious afterglow, he didn't want to pretend it didn't happen. It was the most intimate and intense sexual experience of his life. It had felt so good, she responded so eagerly, he found himself still dripping with his own release and already thinking of when they could do it again. And instead of drinking a beer or reading a textbook or watching baseball after like he was used to, he found himself wanting nothing more than to just hold her and feel her soft skin against his. He wanted to touch her. Smell her. Listen to her body. He was genuinely and truly happy.
Sex with Sara made him finally understand what those women in college had meant by saying sex without the connection was unfulfilling. Sure, sex in general felt great at the time, but it did always leave a strange emptiness in its wake.
Gil, after watching Sara Sidle writhe with each forceful and powerful thrust and quite literally scream with her climax under his body, was left feeling anything but empty. It left him in awe and utterly humbled by his own emotions and by her response. His hand, and any other woman he had been intimate with, paled in comparison to Sara Sidle.
It was as if their coming together was like coming home. He had fit so perfectly into her, so snug like some kind of erotic puzzle price. She had been so wet, and so goddamn tight. He could tell it had been a while for her, her initial wince as he had entered her told him as much, but once she had relaxed around him she felt so perfect. Every inch of him fit into her, and every thrust was like a million years of unexpressed need finding it's perfect, electric and cosmic release. He had involuntarily made sounds even he had never heard himself make before from the sheer intensity and pleasure of it.
Here she was, this beauty of a woman, was in the next room offering him exactly what he had always wanted. No strings. No commitment. No complications. Just sex. Instead of being ecstatic, though, he found himself craving everything she had to offer. All of the strings and complications and commitment she could give him. The mess and the emotions and the frustrations. The hormones and monthly ups and downs. He wanted all of it, and all of her, again and again every single night for the rest of his life.
Staring at her now, in this Saturday morning light, he smiled at the memory and felt his manhood respond.
She had come out of the bathroom, wrapped in a silky robe, her curly hair a mess from where his hands had been. She had looked genuinely surprised to see him there, still naked in her bed and tucked under her musky burgundy sheet. He supposed she thought he would quickly redress and either leave, or find a gentle excuse to bugger off... but he had stayed in her bed while she cleaned herself up in the next room and waited for her to return.
He quietly asked her if he could stay. She raised a questioning brow and nodded, apprehensively, as she silently crawled back into her bed under the sheet. She had adorably lain flat on her back, and stared up at the ceiling in what he interpreted as utter disbelief and shock. She said nothing.
Her body was beyond sated, sexually. He knew that much for sure. Her orgasm had been long and powerful and tight against his penis, milking him. Her near scream had been loud and primal. Her cheeks were still flushed and her pulse was thick and visible on her neck. He watched her for what felt like an eternity, and she never turned her head to make eye contact.
It wasn't until he had seen a single tear slip from her eye and roll down her cheek that he quickly leaned up on an elbow and touched her again, brushing her arm.
"Sara?" He whispered, the concern in his voice thick.
"Sorry. I'm stupid, I'm fine. I'm just... I'm just tired and hormonal." She brushed it off with a small laugh and wiped away the evidence of her emotion. She tried to shrug it off in her tough guy way, but she wasn't fooling him for a second.
"Did I hurt you?" Grissom asked timidly, knowing she had physically enjoyed herself, but maybe she felt emotionally hurt now that all was said and done. She laughed again, this time more genuinely.
"God, no." She sighed. Finally, she turned her head to him, revealing her deliciously swollen lips and sparkling chocolate orbs, "No. You didn't hurt me Grissom."
He simply nodded.
In any other situation, tears after sex would have spooked him and had him running for the hills by now. The shell around his heart was thick and tough, and while he could empathize to an extent with human emotions, it didn't mean he wanted to be responsible for them.. let alone try and fix them. But this time, it was Sara. These small tears, this woman, Sara... was different. So he went with his gut, and shuffled his body closer to hers, cupped her cheek with his still sweaty hand, and kissed her. Square on the lips.
It wasn't like their previous kisses that evening that had been almost aggressive and fuelled by lust and the desire for release. No, this kiss was tender and affectionate.
He kissed her tenderly for what felt like a year, but still it wasn't long enough. They only parted to breathe, and he caught her gaze as her eyes filled with unshed tears again. His eyes searched her face and asked for permission without words and she answered him silently with a lopsided smile, and a small giggle. He shrugged, but said nothing else as he returned his lips gently to hers.
He kissed her again and again, and their second time coming together that evening was slow and tender. There was no screaming the second time, no hurried, sloppy, forceful thrusts. It was just so simple, just like Sara had always been.
He made love to her mouth with his lips, swallowing her moans as his fingers touched her wet core. His lips travelled south and made love to her nipples as she squeaked her pleasure and then he finally made love to her beautiful soft center with his tongue.
She tasted like sweet honey and salt, a mixture of their fluids from moments before. She was swollen and soft and so sensitive. Her climax was powerful, as she painfully gripped his salt and pepper curls with her short fingernails and gasped his name, Gil.
He licked her clean as she came down from her euphoria, and then came back up to kiss her lips once again, letting her taste herself on his mouth as she trembled underneath him. By this point, he had recovered from his first orgasm and was fully erect again. She must have felt him pressed against her stomach because her gentle fingers found him and enveloped him, moving up and down ever so seductively. He gasped into her mouth, and he felt her smile against his lips before she quickly caught him off guard and turned them over and mounted him in one swift move.
As she sunk her wet sex down onto his, he groaned like a wild animal and shuddered in disbelief that this was happening. Again. He forced his eyes to stay open and watch every second of it.
She moved atop him so agonizingly slowly, he felt he would shatter into a million pieces. Like a smashed-in window pane at a crime scene, he would be obliterated with no hope of reconstruction. She was so tight and so soft, his hands found her hips as she cupped one of his pecs with one hand and reached behind her to massage his testicles with the other. That was his undoing, and he released himself again into her warm channel with an uncontrollable and powerful orgasm.
She rode him out as he grunted and spilled his seed into her and her own climax, a third that evening, overtook her. Her's was mostly silent, aside from an uncharacteristic squeak as she bit her lip and willed the tears not to fall again.
They did fall, though, this time freely.
She slumped onto him, his warm penis still inside her, and wept silently against his tacky chest as his strong and gentle hands rubbed circles on her back. She didn't need to justify or explain it, she knew he already knew.
Eventually his hand movements slowed and her tears stopped, and they shifted to lay together, side by side. Neither of them spoke but Grissom remembered the utter bliss and contentment of that moment as they both drifted into a deep sleep together. It was a powerful intimacy he had never experienced before and god, was earth shattering.
It was a similar contentment to what he was feeling now, as he lay beside her and watched Sara's eyelids flutter in her sleep. That first evening had been nearly two years ago now, but he could still replay every second in his mind as if it were yesterday.
They didn't often get Saturday mornings off together, and it was even more rare that he was up before her. They shared a home now, and even had a dog.. but it was usually the case that Sara would be up long before him to let Hank out to pee, or to read. She didn't sleep much.
As if she could read his mind in her slumber, Sara's haze filled eyes fluttered open and met his ocean blue gaze immediately.
"Hi." He smiled cheekily.
"Hi." She returned, squinting her eyes. "You're up early."
He nodded, "Brass paged me."
With a dramatic groan, Sara rolled and shut her eyes again, and tucked her head under the warm covers, mumbling some kind of curse.
"A couple of kids from a local high-school is missing, apparently." Grissom explained grimly.
Quickly uncovering her head with a disgusted look on her face, Sara retorted, "There's not even a body and he's paging you at, what..." she raised herself on her elbows, glancing at the alarm clock on his nightstand, "Barely six in the morning on a Saturday?!"
"I owe him a favour." Grissom nodded as he watched Sara sink back down into her pillow and growled a curse, again, this time more obscenely.
"Fuuuck. He can't keep calling in favours just to blackmail you, you know." Sara laughed sarcastically, "Just because he knows about us, doesn't mean you need to be at his beck and call Gil. The kids probably ran off together anyways."
"Mm." Grissom nodded as he dipped down to kiss the smirk off of her lips, "I know. But this time I actually do owe him."
Rolling her eyes bitterly again, Sara turned her body over and mumbled into her pillow, "Well, don't even think about paging me in on my day off unless there's a body or I might seriously consider running off like those kids too."
With a chuckle, he leaned in and kissed her soft, bare shoulder blade slowly, "Wouldn't dream of it, my dear."
Squirming under his wirey bearded kiss, Sara rolled to her back again and laughed, the blanket slipping and exposing her pink nipple, "I'm sorry I love you, and you know I love you with a beard, but we need to do something about that sabbatical scruff. It tickles, and I have beard burn in places that are going to make wearing jeans to work quite unpleasant."
"Sorry." Grissom blushed with a boyish, sideways grin and nodded, "As soon as we find these dumb kids, I'll shave it and make it up to you."
Pursing her lips, Sara quirked her mouth into a cheeky and seductive smile.
God, she was irresistible.
How he had ever thought his life was better off without a woman in it, he didn't know. Sara wasn't complicated like other women he had met, but she certainly knew how to throw a wrench in his world. All of a sudden the things that had been so important to him were uninteresting and dull in the light Sara brought to his life.
When he once would have leapt out of bed and rushed to a missing person's scene, he now despised the idea of leaving a warm, naked and sleepy Sara Sidle in his bed. He knew her affinity to morning sex, too, and knew that if he weren't leaving for this scene, he would end up very, very lucky. Probably more than once.
He kissed her again quickly, kissing the attitude off of her lips, and groaned his displeasure as he untucked his boxer clad body from the warm sanctuary of their bed.
"I'll start the coffee maker before I leave." He grumbled as he pulled on a fresh pair of boxers and khakis, knowing she wouldn't judge him and his lack of showering. They had enjoyed a shower together the night before - he was clean enough.
"Thankyou. Can you let Hank out to pee before you go?" She mumbled as she hungrily watched him zip up his trousers over his slight bulge from the warmth of the bed, hugging his pillow in his absence.
Nodding, he grabbed a shirt, and leant back over to kiss her one last time, eliciting a teasing moan of pleasure from the woman in his bed.
"Keep that up and I won't get to this scene." He grumbled as he kissed her cheek and made his way to the bedroom door.
"That was kind of the point. It does work every now and then." Sara winked, as he blushed in the doorway. "Be safe."
He returned the wink, and made his way out to the kitchen to start the coffee maker, fill the dog bowl, and let their four legged friend out to pee so his lover could laze in their bed for a while longer. She may as well, if he can't.
God, she was beautiful, and he loved her more than he ever realized he could love another human being.
Sure, he had noticed women in his lifetime.. but none of them would ever compare to his Sara. Her perfectly slim body fit his perfectly and her fingers always knew what he needed without him uttering a word.
Hopefully she could keep their bed warm for a couple hours while they tracked down this kid, so that he could come home and join her, crawl back under the covers and show her just how much he loved her.
This better be good, to be pulled out of his bed on a Saturday morning.