More Myself Than I Am

by unc-annie

"He takes a deep breath and hesitates, imagining for a moment both possibilities. Schrödinger's kiss." Seven times he doesn't kiss her...and one time he does. Eight canon-compliant short stories spanning pre-pilot to late season five, filling in the missing scenes that explain how Grissom and Sara became a couple.

Author's Note: This is my first CSI story in nearly two decades. I had to recover multiple old email addresses just to dig out my password and publish this here. ;) It's been so nice to revisit these characters I love so much. The fact that we are still reading and writing these stories after so long say so much about the timelessness of the characters and their romance, and I'm so grateful to the actors and writers and everyone who created these characters. I hope you'll enjoy this take on the missing scenes that finally brought them together.

Summary:

"He takes a deep breath and hesitates, imagining for a moment both possibilities. Schrödinger's kiss."

Seven times he doesn't kiss her...and one time he does. Eight canon-compliant short stories spanning pre-pilot to late season five, filling in the missing scenes that explain how Grissom and Sara became a couple.

---

1.

She has a ponytail. And too many questions about anthropology for some reason.

She is seated in the third row. During the lecture portion of the session, she listens intently, head cocked almost imperceptibly to the right, eyes narrowed slightly, as if she is assessing him. His gaze returns to her again and again for reasons he can't explain; will never be able to explain. Not with science.

During the question and answer period that follows his lecture, her hand flies into the air over and over, as if trying to flag down a wayward cab. Her eyes never leave his face.

Her questions are intelligent; insightful. And eventually, the question and answer session becomes just a dialogue between the two of them, the rest of the attendees throwing glances at the clock on the wall, shuffling papers restlessly.

When the hour is up, he thanks the audience and dismisses them. And then, impulsively, casually, mentions that he will be available for additional questions after the session. He has carefully trained his eyes away from her when he says this, extending the invitation to the room as a whole. But he doesn't miss the tiny quirk of her eyebrow, or the straightening of her spine, and he feels something he doesn't recognize and cannot name bloom in his chest.

She lingers in her seat as the room empties, suddenly reticent, and he pretends not to notice, as he packs away his slides and specimens. When she stands and begins making her way to the aisle, he feels his breath catch in his throat as he waits to see which way she will turn.

She says nothing as she approaches, and he continues packing away his belongings, an unfamiliar warmth spreading through his body.

"You know…there are computer programs that can create those diagrams now," she says, as he lifts a stack of crime scene sketches and slides them into a briefcase.

He lifts his eyes above the rim of his glasses. Her mouth is pursed in a crooked, suppressed smile, and her eyes twinkle with a playful challenge for a moment before sliding away from him, averting her gaze just over his shoulder.

"I'm aware," he says, his droll tone belying the inexplicable flutter in his breast. "There's a time and place for computer models. But I find the ability to produce the sketches manually informs the final product of the digital versions. It's important not to discount the process."

"Old school," she says, approvingly.

He rolls his eyes, his mouth quirking up on one side, telegraphing his disapproval; his playful displeasure at being called old.

Later, years later, she will tell him that it was that moment she felt her heart stutter. That until this moment, her attraction to him had been purely intellectual, academic. That she had enjoyed their dialogue, their banter during the session, and she had wanted to continue their conversation. But it was this moment, when she first felt…more.

His eyes were so blue, she will tell him. And she wanted to make him smile at her like that again and again.

Her questions tumble out of her like gumballs from a machine, one after another, barely allowing him to finish one answer before another is out of her mouth.

Until finally he answers the question she isn't asking, and offers her his business card.

"It seems you have more questions than I could possibly answer today, Miss Sidle," he says, extending the card across the table. "Perhaps we should continue this later."

Her fingers brush his when she takes the card, her mouth drawing into a tight smile that is already becoming familiar.

He does not expect to hear from her again.

Later, at home in Las Vegas, he convinces himself that the spark he felt with her was all in his head; one-sided wishful thinking.

She is young and beautiful and will surely forget him when she returns to her real life. She is clearly bright and hungry for knowledge, and certainly she approaches all learning opportunities the same way. He is not special. He would be remiss to think he is.

Then her emails begin to arrive.

They are not personal in nature. There is always a professional impetus. Each message is full of questions about articles in forensic journals she has just finished reading or cases she has just finished working.

So he ignores the way his heart leaps when he sees her name in his inbox, and reminds himself that he is always happy to mentor someone with such a promising future in the field. And he pretends not to notice when his eyes linger on her witty asides or her clever word play.

A few months later, she has a case with bugs. A body dumped in the Castro with unusual insect activity. She is struggling to identify the larvae, to find the original crime scene.

She asks him to look at a few photos, and he finds himself comparing the printouts to illustrations in one of his entomology textbooks on a flight to San Francisco.

It is the first time they work a case together. It feels like the millionth. They are in step the whole time. Synchronous.

When he returns to Vegas, gathering evidence in a homicide investigation of his own, he studiously ignores the way his chest aches as he remembers the way she squinted when she looked through the lens of the microscope, the way her hair tickled his arm as she leaned past him to examine a piece of evidence, the way her smile spread slowly across her face when victory was within their grasp.

In his quiet moments alone at home, or in his office, he tries not to hear the echo of his name in her mouth, the second syllable stretched out and lilting in an attempt to draw his attention. As if she doesn't already have his attention. As if he isn't already orbiting her silently, trapped by her inescapable gravity.

He is asked to speak at another conference. In Venice Beach, this time. A smaller, regional gathering specifically for crime scene investigators as opposed to the larger, more generalized Forensic Academy conference where he met her.

One conference per year is usually his limit.

But he could use the conference as an opportunity to go home and visit his mother. It has been too long. She never nags, but he knows she wishes he would come more often. And it is a good opportunity to network with other local departments. That could come in handy if he needs to collaborate in the future.

He chants these justifications like a silent mantra while he composes the email accepting the invitation.

He mentions it casually in his next email.

She never mentions it in her reply, but four months later, on the morning of the first day of the conference, she is in the back of his lecture hall, grinning.

She doesn't ask any questions this time. She only watches him, eyebrows raised, lips pursed. And for the first time in a long time, he feels like he can take a deep breath.

Through unspoken agreement, they attend the other sessions together, spending two days whispering and writing notes to each other in margins of photocopied handouts.

Her hair is down, in soft curls that frame her face.

On the last night, there is a happy hour. And in the warm, dim light of the hotel bar, she smiles, and tilts her head toward a couple at a corner booth and makes a joke about conference hookups that he knows is intentionally provocative.

He needs to get out of there. Out of that bar and that hotel and that conference. Not because he doesn't want to imagine sleeping with her, but because he does. Because he doesn't know yet what he wants from her, but he knows it isn't one night with no strings attached.

They walk along the beach instead, and his hands are drawn to her like a compass to true north. Her back. Her arm. Her hand.

She smiles at him as they talk, not the little smirk she uses when she is teasing him or the pursed grin she tries to hold back when he flatters her, but the full, wide smile that makes his heart yearn for something he didn't know he was capable of wanting.

He prefers the company of women to men. Always has. He assumes it is due in part to growing up as an only child to a single mother. But more than that, he likes women. Women speak their minds and say what they mean and show emotions he doesn't always understand but can at least identify. As opposed to men, who talk around important subjects and only ever seem comfortable expressing anger.

Over the years, more than one female friend has misinterpreted his intentions. And more than once, he has unsuccessfully attempted to make the leap that they seem confident is a natural next step in their relationship.

Always, those relationships end with a whimper rather than a bang.

It has been years since he was with a woman.

Never before has he been the one who wants to initiate the leap. His heart trips ahead, racing, anticipating the moment the relationship tips over the edge of friendship into something more.

When they stop at the pier, her gaze drops to the sand, and he reaches out without forethought or planning and tucks a wayward curl behind her ear, working up the courage to kiss her. His hand lingers in her hair.

Then she lifts her face, and gazes at him with unabashed adoration, and he feels his heart slow to a crawl.

He remembers suddenly how very young she is, remembers that she is only just beginning her ascent in a field where he is considered an expert. It is easy to forget, when they are trading theories and barbs and flirty glances, that she is fifteen years younger than him, only a few years out of school, and sees him as a teacher, a mentor.

She is not a child. She is a grown woman. Beautiful and brilliant and wise beyond her years. But they are not equals. Not in the eyes of the world, and more importantly, not in her own eyes.

And the kind of relationship he wants with her, the only kind of romantic relationship he can imagine having with her, is not possible when she is looking at him like that.

He soaks in the warmth of her gaze for just a minute. And then he turns, letting his hand fall to her arm, guiding her back the way they came, toward the hotel.

He tells himself it is the right decision. He refuses to imagine otherwise.

But when he is back home, in Las Vegas, his heart still thrills at the sight of her name in his inbox. And sometimes, when he is tired, and the world is a dark and lonely place, he closes his eyes and remembers the sound of his name in her mouth and the look in her eyes when she smiles at him.

---

2.

It has been a horrible week.

The only bright spot in this wretched week has been her. From the moment he hears her voice outside the hotel where he is pushing dummies from the rooftop, something inside him unspools, the heavy responsibility of leading his team through this tumultuous time suddenly bearable.

Holly Gribbs, a rookie on her first assignment, is dead. He has been promoted to a supervisory position he isn't sure he wants. And he has just been tasked with firing Warrick – a demand he has impulsively refused.

He watches Warrick walk down the hallway and decides to wait before informing his superiors that he has not, in fact, fired him. Will not be firing him.

Instead, he returns to his office, and stares at his cell phone in the dark.

The team is down two CSIs with Holly dead and Brass moved back to homicide. He won't fire Warrick, but it's possible they will strongarm him into imposing a temporary leave. That would leave just Catherine and Nick and himself. Three people to cover the busiest shift in the busiest crime lab in the country.

He flips open his phone and scrolls through his recent contacts, pausing at her name.

It makes sense, he tells himself. They need the help, and she is already here.

She has done an excellent job. Not that he is surprised. She is not just brilliant. She is also conscientious and dedicated. She does nothing half way. He knew even before he asked her to come that she would be thorough and fair in her handling of the internal investigation into Holly's death. That is why he asked her to come. Her report is evidence that he made the right decision.

He can still see Catherine's face when he announced to the team that he was bringing Sara in to do the internal investigation. Warrick and Nick were blank-faced, trusting blindly that he would choose someone wisely. But Catherine's reaction was visceral.

Last year, he made the mistake of mentioning Sara too many times in casual conversations with Catherine.

He doesn't realize he's doing it, doesn't realize how many stories suddenly begin, "I was talking to Sara and…" or how many new techniques are prefaced with, "I just read about this new method in an article Sara sent me…."

But, of course, Catherine notices. Of course Catherine, with no filter and loose boundaries, finally narrows her eyes and asks him, "Exactly how often do you talk to this Sara person?"

He rolls his eyes and scoffs, explaining Sara Sidle away as just "a CSI from San Francisco"; as someone he met at a conference a while back.

He never mentions her again.

There is no reason to avoid mentioning her — nothing shameful or wrong about their relationship. Their friendship. But he does not want to discuss it with Catherine. He did not then, and he does not now.

For weeks after that awkward conversation, whenever he mentions a journal article, Catherine grins slyly and asks if Sara Sidle sent it to him. He never does more than roll his eyes, and eventually Catherine stops bringing her up.

But Catherine's memory is long. And when he tells the team he's bringing in Sara Sidle, she doesn't hesitate. He can still hear the incredulity in her voice as she repeats, "Sara Sidle?"

Catherine is furious because she doesn't want anyone to investigate Warrick. Her loyalty is clear. But so is his. He would never bring in someone to hurt Warrick. She should know that. There must be an investigation. It's better that it be done by someone he trusts.

The phone buzzes, and it is her. It is as if she has read his mind. As if she knows he wants to talk to her but cannot bring himself to hit the call button.

She asks about the meeting with the lab director. About Warrick. And then she asks if he needs anything else.

He knows she means the investigation, but for one fleeting moment his heart answers with the unvarnished truth. You.

He asks her to stay. Just for a few weeks. Until they can hire some new team members. She says yes immediately, and he is both grateful and apprehensive. He loves having her here. He will miss her when she is gone.

A week later, they are working a kidnapping — a woman abducted from her multi-million dollar mansion. Sara is taking photos in the hall when Nicky arrives to pick up the audio of the ransom call, and he overhears them bantering about who has seniority; hears her taunt, "Who did Grissom handpick to work here?" confident that she is his favorite. She is right, of course. Though he would never admit it. Not even to himself.

A half hour later, they are in the courtyard, and he's holding up a rag for her to smell, teasing her about her rapidly-unraveling theory.

"I keep trying to be your star pupil," she admits with a bashful smile.

"That was a seminar, Sara," he says with just a hint of disapproval. "This is real life."

In his mind, they are back under the pier in Venice Beach, and she is smiling at him like he is some sort of god instead of just a mortal man who doesn't understand the rules of courtship and cannot seem to make a relationship work.

The moment passes, and they are back to work, untangling the clues, working in concert. It has been nearly a year since he was in her city, on her team, working her case, but it feels like no time has passed at all.

They communicate in gestures and eye movements, anticipating each other's thoughts before they can be spoken aloud. She stands so close to him that he can feel her body heat against his skin like a caress. She beams at him when they make progress — not the worshipful smile that makes his heart ache, but a playful, victorious smile that says they are a team and share in this small victory.

In the helicopter, above the vast Nevada desert, they watch a pack of coyotes on the heat sensors and then spot their victim, bound and gagged beneath the earth's surface.

In a blur, they are on the ground, hands in the dirt, digging and calling for her. And then their victim is free, and Sara is handing him the scissors he asked for to cut the bindings, and the paramedics are whisking the traumatized woman off to the ambulance.

He turns back to assess the site and finds Sara with her shoulders slumped, hands on her hips, eyes downcast, head hanging. He feels a rush of protectiveness that is unfamiliar to him in this context, reserved usually for victims or children. And before he can stop himself, he is cupping her cheek. Her hair is whipping in the wind of the rotary blades, soft and silky against the back of his hand. He strokes her cheek with his thumb, savoring the warmth of her skin, and she lifts her eyes to his.

"Are you okay?" he asks, removing his hand and squelching the ridiculous, inappropriate urge to hold her.

She nods once, and then shakes her head ruefully. "It never ceases to amaze me what people will do to each other," she says. Her voice is hard and sad and betrays her disappointment with the entirety of the human race.

She turns and begins barking orders to the uniformed officers over the roar of the helicopter, and their investigation continues.

Later, back at the lab, he is reassuring Catherine that she is not making her daughter weird, though he thinks he of all people is an ironic choice to be the authority on what it takes to make someone not weird. And then Sara interrupts, poking her head out of the garage. "Hey, Grissom!" she says brightly, holding aloft a roll of duct tape. "Could you come tape me up?"

She disappears back into the garage, not waiting for his assent, and he cannot stifle the smile he knows is coming. Something about her, everything about her, just makes him want to smile. He knows Catherine will not miss this, so he turns to her and raises his eyebrows, smirks, and makes a joke of his response. "I love my work," he says. And then he grins.

"It shows," she says as he walks away. Her voice is subdued, and he wonders whether she is just bored, or if she suspects there is more he is not telling her.

In the garage, Sara in the passenger seat of the suspect's car, they are quiet as he leans in close and tapes her hands in front of her, as the victim had been taped when they found her. Neither of them says a word, but their gazes linger, heavy with unspoken feelings.

Sara walks him through her theory, demonstrating the impossibility of the lambskin fibers on the back of the victim's sleeves unless she was seated, unrestrained, in the passenger seat. Unless she is not a victim at all, but a co-conspirator. He is impressed, yet again, with her thought process, her ingenuity, her tenaciousness. She is brilliant. She was born for this job.

She continues, positing her theory that the victim was never unconscious because she never inhaled the halothane on the rag they found at the crime scene.

He can't stop himself from smiling. He knew she would untangle this web of lies and come to this conclusion eventually. He is proud of her, and she is clearly proud of herself. Her eyes sparkle as she holds his gaze, waiting for his praise.

"How pleased am I that I got a sample of her blood?" he says with a smile, revealing that he's already one step ahead of her.

Her head falls forward in defeat, but she is laughing. She wants so badly not just to be his best student, his favorite CSI, but to be his equal. To be his better. She will be someday. He has no doubt.

"So you can go check at the lab and see how that turned out," he finishes, grinning at her and raising his eyebrows playfully.

"Damn it," she says, still laughing. She stands, and suddenly they are so close, and he is dizzy with pleasure at having her in his space. "I wanted to carry the ball over the line."

He could lean forward right now and kiss her. She is close enough to kiss, and he suspects she would be equal parts shocked and thrilled.

He does not, of course. Cannot. He cannot kiss her at work. Cannot kiss her at all.

Instead, he drops his head, averting his gaze, and smiles wryly as she brushes past him, headed for the lab. His cheeks are suspiciously warm.

There is, of course, no halothane in the victim's blood. Between that and the enhanced audio of the ransom call that reveals her voice in the background urging the kidnapper to hurry up, the case is a slam dunk.

They confront their victim-turned-suspect, effortlessly taking turns speaking, explaining their theory, presenting their evidence in a beautifully choreographed dance.

He is seated opposite the suspect and her husband. Sara starts the conversation standing behind him, but once she sits on the couch beside him, his whole body gradually shifts until he is facing her, a reluctant spring bloom searching for the sun.

After shift, they go out to breakfast. Sara is staying in a hotel, expensing all her meals, and since she came here at his request, it's only good manners that he share some of those meals with her, so she is not eating alone. At least that is what he tells himself as she stirs her coffee and watches him, a comfortable silence settling around them.

He didn't realize how much he would love these moments.

For a moment, on the couch, and in that booth, he allows himself to imagine a future where this is his life. Working with her. Eating with her. Simply being in her presence.

When he walks her to her car an hour later, he feels the heaviness of the decision he is about to make. This long-distance friendship they have, it's not enough for either of them anymore. He feels them both reaching for something more.

She leans against her car door and looks up at him, waiting. His gaze falls to her mouth.

He takes a deep breath and hesitates, imagining for a moment both possibilities. Schrödinger's kiss.

If he kisses her, if they do this – try to turn their friendship into something more – he knows how it will end. He knows how that always ends.

Later, he will swear it is not intentional. Not a conscious decision. He will tell her that his decision to ask her to stay was not a desperate attempt to keep her close without risking his heart. That he asked her because the team needed her. Because he liked working with her. Because it was a good career move for her.

But they both know the truth: he is not brave enough yet to make this leap.

Whatever the case, he trades one future with her for another. He raises his gaze from her lips to her eyes.

"Move to Vegas," he says. "Come work for me. Join my team permanently."

Later, she will claim that she hesitates because she is thinking about her life in San Francisco. Her job. Her apartment. Her friends.

But they both know the truth. She understands that she is exchanging one future with him for another. If she works for him, if he is her boss, that changes things.

But she has spent three weeks in this new life, working side by side with him, and she cannot bear to give it up for the possibility that he will someday be brave enough to take a chance on her.

She nods, and he smiles, equal parts relief and anticipation flooding through him.

Two weeks later she returns to San Francisco just long enough to pack up her apartment and process her resignation at the crime lab. He holds his breath the entire time she is gone. And then she is back. And he can breathe again, and their new life begins.

---

3.

Flirting with Sara is different than any other flirting he has ever done. In the past, with other women, it was always a conscious choice. Delicately designed flattery.

With Sara, he does not even realize he is flirting until she is blushing. Until she is smiling at him, biting her lip, raising her eyebrows. Until she is parrying back, her voice warm and playful.

He is just talking to her, making observations about the world that most people squint at in confusion or pondering aloud a puzzle piece that she instinctively solves. In the past, flirting was work. With Sara, it is as natural as breathing.

Still, there are times he does it intentionally.

There is a game they play. It started at that second conference, back in Venice Beach, when she made the joke about the couple in the dark corner of the bar and conference hookups. They make observations about other people, other couples. About sex. It is a way to flirt without flirting. To push the boundaries while still appearing to be professional. They both know they are doing it, but they never discuss it.

She initiates this game more often than he does, but when he does it, her cheeks turn pink and her eyes avert, and she is the most beautiful he ever sees her. He is always looking for opportunities to catch her off guard.

Today they are in an airplane together. The rest of the team is in the airport, interviewing and processing the first class passengers, all of whom witnessed a violent death forty thousand feet in the air.

They are recreating the victim's last moments, and currently he is wounded and heading to the lavatory.

He surveys the tiny bathroom once he arrives, seeing nothing with the naked eye. She hands him a uv light and then his Christopher Columbus, and he examines the DNA deposit he finds on the rim of the toilet seat. As soon as he puts his eye to the microscope, a slow grin begins to spread across his face.

"I take it that's not blood," she says.

"No, but it has protein…." he replies, waiting for her to make the connection.

It doesn't take long. A flash of a grin, and then she nods, her eyes darting away from him momentarily. "Oh. The mile high club," she says, looking back to him with a smirk.

After a pause, he turns back to the microscope, and she continues theorizing. "You know, that means two passengers may have had no idea what was going on inside that cabin."

He is not ready to be finished with their flirting. It is his turn to surprise her. To make her blush. To remind her that they may just be friends, colleagues, but he is also a sexual being. That she once wanted him. Might still.

"You know, high altitude increases the entire sexual experience," he says, forcing his voice to stay casuaI. "It increases the euphoria."

"Well, it's good," she says, her voice equally blase, a little skeptical. "I don't know if it's that good."

His stomach drops. His pulse skyrockets. This was not the response he expected. As always, she surprises him.

He looks up at her slowly, schooling his face.

"Cite your source," she says with a little smile. Another of their favorite games.

"Hand me a swab, please," he says disapprovingly, ignoring her request. He has no source to give. He has no idea where he first read that assertion. Some waiting room magazine cover maybe. Men's Health. Maxim. Cosmo.

She knows she has flustered him. She loves flustering him. She is never happier than when she can turn his own game back on him. Her smirk widens into a full grin.

"You're avoiding the question," she says, clearly pleased with herself. "Enhances the sexual experience. Increases euphoria. Cite your source."

He is faltering. The game is losing its appeal. He is beginning to suspect her source is not some long-forgotten gossipy magazine article. And he does not want to picture her in this tiny airline bathroom, euphoric, with another man.

Their game goes both ways. But she doesn't need to remind him that she is desirable. He desires her all the time.

"A magazine," he says vaguely.

"What magazine?" she asks with a wink.

He frowns, trying to wrest control of this game back in his favor. "Applied Psychodynamics in Forensic Science."

"Never heard of it," she says immediately, a challenge thrown down.

"I'll get you a subscription. Now cite your source," he says calmly, hoping she is bluffing. Turning the tables on her.

"Oh, now you want to go down that route?" she says, eyes shifty. "Nah, nevermind."

She is bluffing. She wanted to make him squirm, but she's the one squirming now.

He keeps his face impassive. "You started it."

Her eyes meet his, and he knows immediately that he has miscalculated.

She sighs and rolls her eyes, shaking her head with an awkward smile. "Delta Airlines. Flight 11-09. Boston to Miami. March '93. Ken Fuller. Hazel eyes. Organic Chem Lab TA. BMOC."

His face is frozen, but his mind is whirling with images of Sara as a Harvard undergrad, flying to Miami for Spring Break with the "big man on campus". Of course. She attracts attention everywhere she goes. Half the lab rats have poorly-hidden crushes on her.

It is ridiculous to be jealous. Ridiculous to feel possessive over a woman he has never even kissed. Ridiculous to be jealous of something that happened in her past, long before she knew him. Ridiculous to believe she is nearly thirty years old and has never had sex with another man. Ridiculous to believe he could ever be what she wants, when she could have…the big man on campus.

She is still talking. Her smirk is less playful now. "Overrated. In every aspect."

She can read his jealousy. She knows this barb landed harder than she intended. She is trying to soften the blow. There's still a challenge in her voice. But the challenge is an offering. This Ken Fuller, he is not competition. He was overrated. There is still room in her life for a man who is not.

"Could we…get back to work?" she says, blushing and flustered. This game of theirs has unsettled both of them today.

"Yeah," he says slowly, setting down his microscope and rising to look into her eyes. "I think, due to your first-hand knowledge and experience in airplane bathrooms…you should do the swab."

He brushes past her, his hand grazing hers intentionally. He smiles so she knows his disapproving tone is only part of the game. He is not judging her. He is not angry. But neither is he unaffected. He wants to be the one with her in that airplane bathroom. She would not find that experience overrated. He would make sure of it.

His exit is a concession. She has won this round of their game.

They do not mention this moment again. Do not even allude to it. There is an unspoken truce. A silent agreement that they both need a break from this game.

They shift their attention back to the case. It is an intense night. A race against the clock to solve the case before the feds arrive and steal it out from under them.

He loves cases like these, where his whole team works as one. Usually they are split into pairs or small groups, spread across the city. It is rare for them all to be on one case, let alone in one room. Even Brass is there for the reenactment. It's like a homecoming. This is how he imagines holidays feel if you are born into a large extended family, boisterous siblings and cousins talking over one another, jockeying for attention.

It is Sara who breaks the case.

"Guys," she says, drawing their attention as they pretend to kick and stomp the dummy of the dead man. "If you jump a man at the exit, he dies at the exit."

But the victim did not die at the exit. He died five feet down the aisle, facing away from the hatch, trying to flee the mob. He was no longer a threat when they beat him to death.

Back at the precinct, he and Catherine finish filing the report and find the other members of their team in the breakroom debating the culpability of the mob, none of whom have been arrested.

"Well, it's wicked serious in here," Catherine says as they enter.

Sara turns to them, eyes flashing. "Yeah, well, we were just talking about murder and whether we would commit it. I couldn't. Warrick could. And Nick's on the fence. We're taking an exit poll."

She's furious, which is a sure sign that she's hurting.

He has learned a lot from working with her night in and night out for the last six months. Her sweet sunshiny disposition is only a part of who she is. Her righteous indignation is another part. She holds the world to a higher standard than most, to a standard it often fails to meet, and her disappointment at that failure is deep and personal.

But there is something else. Something he feels but cannot identify yet. Something he knows to be true long before he will know the full truth of it.

The world has hurt her. Life has hurt her. And she is never more angry than when she is reminded of that hurt.

Something has reminded her of that hurt today, and she is absolutely furious that the people she trusts, this little family of theirs, can so easily admit to the possibility that they could take a life under the right circumstances.

When Catherine agrees that she would kill to protect her daughter, Sara is incensed. "You didn't even hesitate!"

He watches her closely as she hangs her head. He looks past the judgment to the betrayal. To the pain.

"What do you think, Grissom?" she asks softly, raising her eyes to his. He can see the plea in her eyes. He knows she is not asking out of mere curiosity. She needs him to pass this test.

He takes a breath, and then reframes the argument, pointing out that the victim only became a threat once everyone ignored the warning signs that he was struggling. The man was ill, in the midst of a medical crisis, and not one person looked at him and saw that. They saw only the ways he was inconveniencing them.

He knows what it is to go unseen. He has been a ghost most of his life. It is only recently, only in the last year or so, as he has approached midlife, that he has begun to feel a part of anything. It is only since he met her that he has begun to feel seen.

He suspects Sara knows this feeling as well.

On the face of it, she is anything but a ghost. She is the life of the party. She walks in the room, and all eyes are on her. She is loud and assertive and stringent at times. She needles Nick and Warrick. Flirts with Greg and Dave. Goes toe to toe with Catherine. She has made a bigger imprint on this group in six months than he has ever made on any group. Ever.

But he is beginning to think this is a mask she wears. That somewhere under this facade there is another woman. One no one sees.

"If just one person had stopped and taken the time to look at the guy," he concludes. "To listen to him, to figure out what was wrong with him, it might not have happened. It took five people to kill him. Would have only taken one person to save his life."

The team is quiet, absorbing his words. And then his eyes meet hers, and the mask slips for just a second. Her gratitude, for his advice, for him, is right there. And it's almost too much for him to bear. He looks away, but the warmth of her gaze stays with him, spreading slowly through his body.

He has met her approval. No. More than that. He has made her proud. She has seen him, truly seen him, and she likes what she sees.

After that day, he feels a closeness to her that is deeper than what they had before. He aches to be near her, not to flirt and joke, but to feel like he is the person she sees when she looks at him like that. She makes him want to be a better version of himself. She restores his faith in the human being.

The next three weeks, he partners with her on nearly every case. He feels Catherine's eyes on him every time he says, "Sara, you're with me."

He knows he needs to stop. Needs to shuffle the team around. Needs to spend equal time mentoring all the younger members of his team. Needs to be careful not to show favoritism.

But he needs her.

So when he gets the call about the body dump in the desert two hours before the start of his next shift, he only hesitates for a second before calling her to back him up. She hates the bugs. Bees especially. But she soldiers through.

He should have known the second they saw the x-rays that this was going to be a hard case for her. A few years from now, he would have known immediately, and he would have tried to offer her extra support. But he doesn't know yet, why a woman with a face full of healed bone fractures is going to make Sara rage. He barely even looks at the x-rays, because he's so busy with his bugs.

When they meet the victim's husband, when he comes in voluntarily to answer their questions, they both know. They don't have the evidence to prove it yet, but this asshole is a wife beater and wife killer. He knows it. And Sara knows it.

The smirk on Scott Shelton's face is getting to both of them.

Sara slides him the file with the x-rays.

"Mr. Shelton, did your wife drive race cars?" he asks.

The man has the audacity to laugh. "You're kidding me."

"No. The two most common causes of facial trauma in adult women: motor vehicle accidents…and domestic violence."

The suspect tries to explain away the three separate domestic violence complaints against him. Tries to blame his wife for being 'excitable'.

"Like I said, I wrestled her off me. But I never, ever laid a hand on her."

"How about a gun?" Sara asks, her voice dripping with antipathy.

The man scoffs, shifts in his seat, uncomfortable with her accusation. Perhaps with her presence entirely. He looks to Grissom for camaraderie. "You've got your hands full with that one."

"So do you," he says immediately. Sara hears the compliment in his warning, and her eyes flicker with gratitude for just a second before hardening again.

Even if he didn't already suspect this man beat and then murdered his wife, he would revile him for this. He will never commiserate with a man threatened by a strong woman.

At the apartment, Brass and their suspect in tow, she is calm and collected as she sprays the hallway, looking for blood. Until she finds it.

Until their suspect says, "I have no idea how that got there."

Then her fury is unleashed. Her voice rises to a yell as she approaches him, finger pointed in accusation. "It got there…when you shot your wife in the head. Before you wrapped her in a blanket and dumped her in the mountains!"

The suspect smacks her hand away. "Get your finger out of my face, bitch!"

Grissom sees red, but Sara is already beyond that. She shoves the suspect, finger back in his face, yelling. "Touch me again, and you'll pull back a stump!"

He grabs her, shocked. He pulls her away, to protect her from the suspect, or to protect her from herself. Maybe both. He's shouting her name repeatedly, but she's not even acknowledging him. She has, at least, stopped lunging. She is still in his arms.

"Get him out here, Jim," he says to Brass, his hands still on her arms as Brass pulls the suspect into the living room.

"I told you she was a handful," the suspect snarls.

"You don't know a handful!" she yells, finger back up and pointing.

"Hey. Hey," he says gently, lowering her arm and trying to pull her attention away from the suspect and back to him. He should be angry with her for compromising the investigation, but all he feels right now is worried. He has never seen her like this. He has seen her angry a million times. But not like this. "What is wrong with you?"

"I am a woman, and I have a gun. And look how he treated me," she grinds out. "I can only imagine how he treated his wife."

Her fury melts away, replaced by an emptiness that worries him even more.

Everything, from the neighbor's statement to the bullets to the blood spatter, says he killed her five days ago.

Except the bugs.

The bugs say she's been dead three days. The suspect was in New Orleans three days ago.

He doesn't understand it. But the evidence doesn't lie.

The suspect cops to the spousal abuse, claims those incidents are responsible for the blood on his walls. And there's nothing they can do to prove him wrong.

The suspect walks.

He finds her asleep in the breakroom, the tea kettle screaming. He rescues the kettle and wakes her, refusing to think about how beautiful she looks asleep; how much he wants to wake up beside her. She has been up all night looking for evidence that Scott Shelton killed his wife, and she has come up empty handed.

He doesn't understand her obsession with this case. Why this is different than any other case she works night after night. He doesn't know what to say to her about it. So he says nothing.

Instead, he asks her to investigate Warrick. Again.

Later that night, he's in his office when she seeks him out. He assumes she has news about Warrick's failure to appear in court. About Ecklie's accusation that he was gambling instead.

But she's there about something else.

"You know how you say we're the victim's last voice?" she says quietly. "I thought it was our job to speak for Kaye Shelton."

"You don't crunch evidence to fit a theory," he says firmly. This isn't like her. And he doesn't like it.

"What if you hear the victim's screams?" she continues, her voice quiet and sad. All the anger gone out of her. "In the car? At the store?"

"You have empathy for her, Sara," he replies. "You want someone to pay for what was done to her. That's normal."

She is quiet for a minute, and he thinks this conversation is finished. That she will turn and go. He's sorry to see her hurting, but this is a part of the job. She knows that. She's not a rookie. She's been doing this job for years.

"You want to sleep with me?" she asks suddenly.

His whole body freezes. He does not understand the question.

Yes. Of course he does.

But also, no. Not like this.

What is she insinuating? Why is she asking him this? His heart is racing. His body is still frozen. She's not saying anything. He takes off his glasses, and looks at her carefully.

Finally he can think of nothing else to say except: "Did you just say what I think you said?"

"That way, when I wake up in a cold sweat under the blanket, hearing Kaye's screams…you can tell me it's nothing. It's just empathy."

She turns and walks away.

His heart breaks. For her. Because he doesn't want her dreams to be haunted by the horrors they see.

And for himself. Because he wishes he could hold her at night when she hears those screams.

He sits in the dark for a long time, just thinking. Thinking about all the decisions that brought them to this point. Thinking about how close they are to where they are supposed to be, and how far apart they still are.

He cannot bear to see her hurting like this. He hates when Sara is mad at him. But her disappointment is worse.

He goes over it all in his head one more time. The body in the desert, the bugs collected at the scene from the corpse. The fibers from the blanket.

The blanket.

Maybe. Just maybe.

He returns to the evidence lockers. Pulls out the blanket and unfolds it, paying special attention to the folds, the gathers, the creases left in the material. The body was not just draped in a blanket. Not just rolled up in it. Whoever dumped this body wrapped it tight. Maybe tight enough to keep the bugs out for a couple of days.

He is alone with his pig for hours, tracking the arrival of the insects. In between taking photos and writing in his log, he thinks of her. He hopes that whatever he discovers, it will give her peace. He hopes she will be proud of him again.

He hears her footsteps and knows it is her. Just…feels her. She is smiling. And his heart skips a beat.

He reaches for a crate and pulls it next to him, offering her the place beside him. She sits, and then pulls out a thermos of coffee, handing it to him. And then she pulls out a blanket and wraps it around his shoulders. Her hand lingers on his arm. Her eyes linger on his.

"Thanks," she says softly.

He is not even attempting to hide his smile anymore. He has never in his life felt more seen. More loved.

They sit in silence for a long time. Just…together. Whatever happens with this experiment, they are a team. They have done their best. They have seen each other and been seen.

After a long time, she says quietly, "She never had a chance. Men like Shelton, they never stop. No matter how many times they apologize. No matter how many times they promise it will never happen again. They never stop. They only escalate."

He knows this is true. He also knows, with a surety he can't explain, that she did not learn this in a textbook.

He nods quietly, giving her space to continue.

"She should have left," she says finally. "Someone was bound to die if she stayed."

Leaving is not that simple for victims of domestic violence. But he does not say that. He knows she understands this. There is no reproof in her voice, only sorrow. She's not talking about Kaye Shelton.

She's quiet again, and he sees her tug her blanket tighter around her, warding off the cold of the desert night. He reaches for his blanket immediately. She starts to protest, and he compromises by wrapping it around both of them. It's a large blanket. There's plenty to share.

She smiles at him again, and scoots closer. They record another round of observations and sip their coffee, snuggled together under his blanket. As always, their bodies seem drawn together by forces outside of their control.

He rests his hand on her back, stroking his thumb just once on the soft material of her blanket. This is inappropriate. Too much. He needs to stop. And then she leans her head against his shoulder, and his heart aches.

"Thank you," she says again. "For doing this."

He wants to tell her that she doesn't need to thank him. That this is his job. That he's doing this for Kaye Shelton. For the justice system. But they both know he would not be out here without her.

"Thank you," he says instead. There's so much more he wants to say, but he doesn't know where to start.

She lifts her head and looks at him, waiting. He drops his hand from her back to his lap. It will be years before he can put into words the way she restores his faith – the way she makes him want to live up to her expectations – and longer still before he can say it to her. For now, he can only talk around the feeling.

"For not giving up on me. For reminding me that sometimes it takes a few tries to get it right."

Her eyes glisten with tears, and he knows that she understands he's not just talking about the case. "Grissom," she says, and the longing in her voice breaks something inside him.

He lifts his hand from his lap and cups her cheek. The silence between them is heavy. His gaze drifts from her eyes to her mouth and then back to her eyes.

In that moment he knows two fundamental truths. He is completely, irrevocably in love with her. And he chose wrong.

That night, in the parking lot of the diner, when he asked her to join his team, that was the worst mistake of his life. Because he cannot undo that. He is her boss now. And if he kisses her right now, if he tries to correct his mistake, he will destroy both of their careers and both of their reputations.

He might be willing to risk his own. But he cannot subject her to an investigation. They will go back over every one of her cases. Internal Affairs will question not just the two of them, but anyone who has worked with them, looking for evidence of inappropriate behavior, favoritism. They will question her hiring. Her solve rate. Her capability.

She will lose her job. And even if she doesn't, no one will ever believe she got where she is on merit alone. It will follow her for years.

This morning, in the breakroom, when he asked her to look into Warrick again, she scoffed and said something about Warrick being his favorite. He told her that was why he needed her to do the investigation. So there could be no accusations of favoritism.

What he didn't say is that Warrick is not his favorite. She is.

And while he loves Warrick enough to make sure it's Sara who does his investigations, he loves Sara too much to subject her to one at all.

He knows what they will say about her.

He cannot be the reason they say those things.

He shakes his head and sighs, wishing desperately things were different. He slides his hand from her cheek, and picks up the notebook in his lap. "It's time to count," he says.

She nods slowly, and scoots away, picking up her own notebook, and he feels the loss of her touch acutely.

He was right. The blanket was the key. Kaye Shelton was dead five days before they found her body, not three.

But it's not enough for the Sheriff, who is convinced a jury won't understand the science.

So it's back to the drawing board, or the autopsy room, as it were. He's standing outside waiting for Doc Robbins when Sara confronts him again, frustrated that he has given up.

He spins a long story about the history of forensics and how they are a part of the process, and it is their responsibility to educate the public. And when his body arrives, he takes great pleasure in pulling back the blanket so she can see it's Kaye Shelton. The smile she gives him makes the pain of last night bearable.

And when she breaks the case, when she finds the blue teflon residue from the suspect's custom bullet in the victim's hair, he is so proud of her he could burst. She is so happy, teasing him about it being easier to educate the jury about bullets than bugs. Less Latin, she says, and he cannot stop the smile or the wink. He adores her.

It was not a mistake, he tells himself as he watches Brass slap handcuffs on Scott Shelton. Hiring her was not a mistake.

Look what she can do. Not just for these victims. Not just for this lab. But for him too. She reminded him of who he once was. She made him be the best version of himself.

She was made for this job. The lab needs her. He needs her.

It's true, he will always love her.

But hiring her was not a mistake.

---

4.

He's read the form four times, and he is no closer to understanding it than after the first.

She has given him no warning. There is no explanation. He wonders briefly if it's some sort of family emergency, but in the three years he has known her, he has never once heard her mention her family. And what kind of family emergency would necessitate a year of her time?

He hears footsteps approaching and looks up, relieved to see it is her.

"What is this?" he asks, waving the form in the air. The question comes out a little harsher than intended. He's just surprised. He's just…trying to imagine the lab without her, and his chest is suddenly feeling a little tight.

"It's just what it says," she replies, her face impassive. She takes a few steps into his office. "It's a request for a leave of absence. Six months. A year maybe?"

"Why?" He asked immediately. He knows what it is. It's the why he doesn't understand. She's being obtuse on purpose. Her eyes are hard and cold, and he does not understand this game.

"I was thinking about checking out the federal government system. FBI."

He laughs, relieved. There's nothing she could learn at the FBI that she couldn't learn in their lab. And she would hate it. All the red tape and bureaucracy.

"We have the best lab in the country," he says, and his voice sounds patronizing even to him. But this whole conversation is ridiculous. She should have just asked him about the feds. He could have told her it wasn't worth exploring. Saved her the hassle of filling out the form.

Her eyes shift to the side, before meeting his gaze again. "I need a different work environment."

His stomach plummets. This has nothing to do with the feds.

"What does that mean?" he asks, already dreading her answer.

"One with, um, communication. Respect."

He has no idea what she is talking about. She must have had a fight with Warrick. Or Nick, maybe. Whatever it is, he's certain she's blowing it out of proportion. He is not interested in playing principal to a bunch of spatting children.

"Everyone here respects you," he says, brooking no argument.

"You don't," she says immediately.

It's him, she's mad at. He did not see that coming.

Things between them have cooled some lately. Settled a little. They don't flirt like they used to, and he doesn't lay in bed at night aching for the wrong decision he made. They are friends. Colleagues. They work well together. Just like they always have.

Their case is going great. Sara can get emotional sometimes, and she gets frustrated with him when he tries to keep her on an even keel – when he reminds her to stay professional and compartmentalize. But this case hasn't been like that at all. This case has been fascinating. He's had a great couple of days. He got to visit the body farm. He got to make bullets out of frozen hamburger meat.

The hamburger meat.

He knows she's a vegetarian. Of course he knows. He notices everything about her. Of course he noticed when she stopped eating meat. And he knows she stopped after they stayed up all night with the pig. He remembers every second of that night, including the part where she muttered that she was never eating bacon again.

He didn't forget.

He just didn't understand why she was asking him how many meals they've shared together. They've shared so many. During breaks on shift. Group breakfasts after work. And their dinners. From before. When she asked how many meals they've shared, he was thinking about those dinners, and he didn't understand what she wanted from him.

Her being a vegetarian has nothing to do with asking her to clean up an experiment using raw meat. He wasn't asking her to eat it. It was just a part of the job. He asks her to dig for body parts at the garbage dump. He asks her to sift through liquified human decomps. She never complains about that.

It never for one second occurred to him that she would be opposed to handling a chunk of hamburger. And when she complained, he immediately told her to have Nick do it. He wouldn't have done that for anyone else. If Warrick or Nick had complained about the hamburger, he would have rolled his eyes and walked away.

He doesn't understand what she wants from him.

"Is this about that hamburger thing?" He can hear the incredulity in his voice. She's not going to like that. But he cannot believe this is why she's so upset.

"No, Grissom. This is not about that hamburger thing. I- I- I don't believe you. How can you reduce everything I've said to some kind of single quirk? You think the problem here is just about me?"

Everything she's said? She hasn't said anything.

He's staring at her, mouth hanging open. He's so confused. He hates it when she is angry with him, and this time he genuinely doesn't even understand why.

"If you don't sign my leave, I'm going to have to quit," she says, calmer now, but no less determined.

A wave of panic shoots through him. She cannot quit. He cannot let her quit. He needs her.

It's only been a year and a half, but he cannot imagine this lab without her. He cannot go back to a life without her laughter wafting out of the DNA lab, without her victorious fist pump when he assigns her the most outrageous case of the night, without her insight into their shared cases, without her impish grin when she makes a clever pun. The lab will be so empty without her. He will be so empty without her.

He wants to tell her. He wants to be eloquent and passionate. He wants to tell her it will break his heart if she leaves. He wants to tell her that even though he chose wrong, he's come to terms with it and made peace with it, but only because he still gets to see her every day — gets to hear her laugh, gets to breathe in the scent of her when she reaches past him for a slide, gets to feel the warmth radiate off her body when she presses against him to look over his shoulder. If she takes that away, he'll have nothing left. Now that he's had her, he can't live without her.

She starts to walk away, and he calls her name. She stops and turns back to him, waiting. But his clumsy tongue doesn't know how to say those things without making this situation worse. And so says the only thing he can think of that might make her stay:

"The lab needs you."

She scoffs and shakes her head, disappointed. "Great," she says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. And then she is gone. And his heart is empty.

He leaves the form on his desk, unwilling to sign it, unsure how to fix this, and throws himself back into the case at hand.

It's a heartbreaking case, the kind he doesn't like to think about, when innocent children are hurt by the people who should be protecting them. And though nothing he can do will ever fix the damage that has been done, his work can ensure that this little girl will never be hurt again by this man.

Catherine invites herself over for breakfast after they close the case, after they listen to a man confess to the kind of atrocity that turns his stomach. And because he knows this case has been harder for her than it was for him, he allows it.

He's not comfortable with people in his home, but Catherine is immune to his discomfort. She makes herself at home, and he offers her what comfort he can, reminding her that it is only human to be bothered by cases of this nature.

"I heard about you and…Sara," Catherine says, apropos nothing, and then raises an eyebrow and waits for his response.

He deflects automatically, smiling awkwardly, shoving down the discomfort and fear her inquiry invokes. "Sara, you know…she gets very emotional."

"Are you in denial?" Catherine asks immediately, her voice incredulous. "No, no. That's way too analytical. Wow. You got burned bad, huh?" He says nothing, but she continues anyway. "Welcome to the club. It happens to everyone. I got third degree burns from my marriage. Everybody just moves on."

"Good," he says. "Let's move on."

He does not want to discuss Sara with Catherine. He did not want to discuss her back when she was the girl who sent him too many emails and whose voice over the phone lines made his heart stutter in a way that was unfamiliar and scary. He did not want to discuss her when she was newly hired, and he could not stop himself from flirting with her no matter how hard he tried to be professional. And he most certainly does not want to discuss her now, when he is terrified she is about to walk out of his life.

But Catherine is not going to let him off the hook that easily.

"But you have to deal with it!" she demands. "You have to deal with it before it goes away!"

His stomach drops. He does not want her to go away. Of everything he has ever wanted, he wants this most of all: for her to stay.

Catherine is droning on and on about him being the supervisor and people building a family and the Grand Tetons, and he is not listening to any of it, because all he can hear is "You have to deal with it before it goes away."

And he knows. He knows that if he does not do something, Sara is going to go away.

He does not know what to say to her. He tried, and failed, already with words. He told her the lab needs her, and he hoped she would hear the hidden message in his words – that he needs her. But she didn't. Couldn't. Or wouldn't. And his poor attempt with words only made her more upset.

If he cannot use words, maybe he can use actions. So he reaches for his address book and dials his phone. He is hesitant, awkward, when his call is answered. "Yeah. Uh, hi. I'd…uh…I'd like to get some flowers for a girl," he says. Then he second guesses himself. "No, no. Not flowers. A plant. A living plant. She…likes vegetation."

He sees Catherine smirk and knows he sounds like a fool. He is so bad at this. This is why he chose the way he did, so he would never have to do this. He knew if he chose to kiss her that night in the diner parking lot, they would end up here: with his inability to live up to her expectations, his failure to understand her needs, and his pathetic attempts to keep her from leaving him.

He chose the job instead of the relationship because he is good at his job. And still he is here, fumbling on the phone with a florist, talking about vegetation and perseverating over the sentiment on the card. From, Grissom.

He is an idiot. She is going to leave him.

But she does not leave him. The next day, at the end of shift, she's back in his doorway. This time with a large plant in her arms, two white blooms erupting from a forest of green.

"Grissom?" she says softly, her question clear.

"I was going to send flowers," he says. "But I thought you'd prefer something living. You deal with enough dead things."

His heart is beating out of his chest. She steps inside his office, closes the door, and walks over to him. She sets the lily on his desk and sits in the chair, facing him. Her form is still on his desk. It lays between them, silent and taunting.

"Why?" she says finally.

He breathes slowly. He reaches for the words to tell her how much he will miss her, but they elude him. He braces himself for her anger, but today she is all softness and wistful gazes.

"Remember how much fun we used to have?" she says softly.

He doesn't say anything, but he does remember.

"Do you even want me here anymore, Grissom? You asked me to come, and I came. And now we hardly ever work together, and when we do, half the time you ignore me. I can't tell if you just…lost interest in me, or if you want me to leave but want it to be my decision."

"Sara," he says, looking up suddenly to meet her gaze. His voice betrays his horror. Whatever he intended, it was never that. Never to make her feel like that.

She looks at him with those big brown eyes, and he forgets every reason why they can't be more than friends; more than colleagues. Rules be damned. Reputations be damned. He doesn't care about anything but making that look go away and making her smile again. His gaze goes to her mouth, and he wonders if that is the only way to fix this. If being friends and colleagues is too hard because it's not enough for either of them.

She bites her bottom lip, waiting for his response, and he is back under that pier. This time, she's not gazing at him in adoration. But she's still waiting for that kiss.

He can't do it now anymore than he could do it then. But it hurts more now.

He sees the disappointment in her eyes when she realizes it's not going to happen. She shakes her head sadly and sighs.

"Spathiphyllum," he says.

"A peace lily," she replies. He nods. When the florist suggested it, he knew immediately it was the perfect choice. They need more peace in their lives in general, but mostly he wants them to be at peace with each other.

"They're cleansing," he says. "They remove toxins from the air, including formaldehyde and ammonia."

He wonders if this plant can filter the other toxins between them. Doubt. Jealousy. Disappointment.

She stands and reaches for the plant. "It's beautiful," she says. "Thank you."

And then she's gone.

The next day, he assigns her to his case – a body found by hikers on a seldom-used trail high in the mountains. He listens to her theories and walks her through the process of collecting the insects. He lets her pin them to the board and create the timeline. He encourages her to go through the process outloud, and praises her when she walks him through the whole thing flawlessly. She gives him a shy smile then, and his heart breaks a little. It takes so little to make her happy. She asks so little of him.

He has been denying himself the pleasure of her company, self-flagellating for the sin of cowardice. He realizes now that she also has been paying for his transgression.

For two weeks, he chooses her again and again. As often as he can get away with it, he says, "Sara, you're with me."

He remembers how much fun they used to have.

On the fifteenth day, the form disappears from his desk. She never mentions it again.

A week later, they sit side by side in the empty bleachers of an ice rink, discussing the death of a hockey player. He scoffs at the violence of the game, the never-ending string of penalties, and she teases him that he just doesn't like sports. He disagrees, offering his lifelong love of baseball as evidence.

"That makes sense," she says, her voice light and playful. "All those stats."

"It's a beautiful game," he counters.

She raises an eyebrow skeptically, a hint of bitterness creeping into her voice as she asks, "Since when are you interested in beauty?"

And for once, he knows exactly what to say to her. The truth. He leaves her speechless with his response.

"Since I met you."

5.

She is sitting on the curb, oblivious to the noise and bustle all around her, just staring off into space. He just watched the paramedics close the ambulance doors and drive away with Greg inside, and he thought that was the worst of the injuries to his team. But suddenly he is terrified that she has injuries he can't see. She's cradling her hand and there's blood on her face. But it's the vacant look in her eyes that scares him most.

He hurries to her side, crouches beside her. "Are you okay?" he asks softly, his heart in his throat.

She turns to look at him. "Uh huh," she says, but she is clearly not okay. Nothing in her demeanor is okay. She's lost in another world.

His gaze falls to the gaping wound on her upturned palm. It needs medical attention. He reaches for her automatically, his fingers touching her gently.

"Honey, this doesn't look good." He hears the words come out of his mouth as if they are coming from somewhere else. Someone else. In the five years he has known her, their relationship ebbing and flowing, he has never called her honey. At least not out loud.

He is protective of his team. Seeing one of them hurt or threatened, be it by a suspect or an administrator, always ignites something in him. But usually it is fury; a quiet steely determination. Only with Sara does it invoke tenderness. Honey.

"It's fine," she says, spacey and unfocused. "Clean up is going to be something. We should get started."

His mouth settles into a frown. "You need to get stitches," he tells her. He keeps his voice gentle but firm. He's not going anywhere until he's sure she's receiving care. He gestures for a paramedic, noting automatically, gratefully, that it is not her paramedic. Not that he is hers anymore. He pushes away that thought and addresses the medic, though his eyes never leave Sara's face. "Would you take care of her hand, please?"

He holds both her hands, helps her rise to her feet, and hands her off to the paramedic despite her protests. The medic leads her to the ambulance, but she is watching him over her shoulder, silently telegraphing her desire to stay with him, and his heart aches for her.

All day, as he meets with the sheriff and investigates the source of the explosion and works on his case, there is a steady hum of worry about her. She's gone only for a couple hours, just long enough to get stitches, and also to be cleared of any more serious trauma, he hopes. He was far more concerned about shock than the hand wound. And then she is back on the case, off to look for a suspect with Brass, and he tries to stop worrying about her. He tells himself that Jim will look after her if she needs looking after. He tries to quiet the jealous voice in his head that whispers that it should be him with her – that no one else can protect her like he can, because no one else loves her like he does.

The day goes from bad to worse. Catherine is suspended. His leadership is called into question. And he can't hear half of it because his ears refuse to cooperate.

How can he protect his team if he can't even hear the threats against them? He eyes the rolodex on his desk with the number for the surgeon. He has avoided scheduling the surgery, scared it won't work, unwilling to face the possibility that this is permanent. But it might finally be time to do something about this.

Then, as he's sitting in his office trying to process the paperwork before he leaves for the day, both Brass and Nick independently come to him worried about Sara.

Sara.

He knew she was not okay. She didn't wait for Brass to clear the room. She put herself between the police and the suspect. She pulled a gun on a suspect. She could have been….

He can't even think about it.

She has always been impulsive, emotional. But this is something different. Nick thinks she's feeling invulnerable; that surviving the lab explosion has her on some sort of high. But he's looked into her eyes today. He knows that's not the case. She's being self-destructive. She doesn't care about her own safety. She needs someone to protect her from herself.

This last year has been a mess. Their relationship…. She didn't do anything wrong. He knew, when he chose job instead of relationship, that someday she would move on. It is enough for him to keep her close. To work with her. To be near her. But she is young and beautiful and passionate, and he cannot expect that to be enough for her.

For years, she worked beside him, and he watched her disappear into the job. He told her over and over that she needed a diversion, a hobby. But he didn't think about how much it would hurt to watch her find one.

He should have known that her diversion would be young and handsome and charming. He should have known her diversion would be someone she met at work, because where else would she meet someone? But he didn't know how much it would hurt him to watch her make plans with him. To pass along messages from him to her. To page her on her day off and wait hours for her to reply because she's off at a vineyard with him.

He never used to have to page her at all. She just appeared when he needed her.

He was cruel to her. He is ashamed of the way he pushed her away. He can still hear her voice pointing out that she just did what he told her to do. Telling him that it was confusing.

Of course, it was confusing for her. It was confusing for him too.

He didn't want to push her away. He didn't want more distance from her. When she came to him after she testified in the Haviland case, he wanted to tell her to get rid of her stupid medic – her boyfriend who was not her boyfriend. Who was just someone she went with to movies. He wanted to beg her for another chance. He wanted to tell her that he would take her to movies if that's what she wanted.

But he knew what happened when she was on the stand. The defense attorney didn't just bring up her relationship with the medic. She had to sit on that stand while the defense attorney asked her about their relationship too. He thinks about all the times he hasn't kissed her. All the times he hasn't touched her the way they both so desperately wanted. All the times he chose the job and not the relationship. And still she had to sit on that stand and listen to an attorney accuse her of falsifying evidence to please him. She had to listen to them speculate publicly, in front of her coworkers, about how far she would go to please him… "whether he returns her attentions or not".

She is the consummate professional. She never makes mistakes. Every other member of the team is attacked by the defense attorneys for the errors in their work. Small errors that mean little in the grand scheme of things. But still, errors. But they cannot find even that on Sara. The only thing they can use to attack her is him. They humiliate her in public, and they use him to do it.

He is reminded yet again of the price she will pay for his weakness if he gives in to this thing between them. So he pushes her away. And she lets him. And then he lashes out at her for doing exactly what he told her to do.

It is a wonder she does not hate him.

He knows too that she is no longer seeing her medic. And why. He did not work that case with her, but he is her supervisor. He reads all the reports. And he hears the whispered pity around the office. She holds her head high and pretends not to care, and he is consumed with guilt. He pushed her away because he was too weak to take the risk, and she just keeps paying the price.

He looks again at the rolodex. Thinks about Catherine and her kicked back report and her week of unpaid leave. Thinks about Greg in the ambulance. Thinks about Sara, gun drawn and eyes vacant. If he can't work this job anymore, who will protect them? The surgery might not work, but if he doesn't at least try, his days in this job are surely numbered.

"You got a minute," she says softly from his doorway, leaning against the door jam in a way that always makes his heart flutter a little.

"I was just about to leave," he says. He doesn't know how to talk to her tonight. He should confront her about what happened at the crime scene, but he doesn't even know what to say. He takes the doctor's card from the rolodex and begins packing his bag. One crisis at a time.

"Yeah, the schedule says you're off tonight," she says. He nods and mumbles a confirmation. "Me too."

"You should be on paid leave," he says, still worried about her.

"I'm fine," she insists. He feels a flair of irritation. She's far from fine. She always says she's fine. She's not fine.

"You were fortunate," he says. "And I'm not talking about the explosion."

"You talked to Brass," she says, rolling her eyes.

"And Nick," he confirms.

"We got the guy," she says. Blase. Unaffected. As if she didn't just nearly die twice today on his watch.

"Is that all you have to say?" he asks, standing and walking toward her. He should stay in his office. He should keep the distance between them. But he needs to feel the rush he gets from being near her. He needs to be close to her. He needs to reassure himself that she is okay.

"Would you like to have dinner with me?"

The jolt that goes through his body stops him in his tracks. She's not just asking about grabbing a meal with a coworker after shift. They both know it. For two and half years they have avoided this discussion by mutual agreement. They have flirted and fought and talked around it incessantly. But they never address it directly. She is breaking all the rules today.

He knows why she is doing this. For the same reason she rushed into that crime scene before it was cleared. She is self-destructing, and he will not be the weapon that wounds her.

"No," he says, despite the fact that he wants nothing more. Nothing except for her to be safe and well. Nothing except for protecting her when she is too rattled to protect herself.

"Why not?" she asks. "Let's have dinner. Let's see what happens."

She's smiling at him like she hasn't in years. She's so beautiful it is physically painful. He must be as cold and unfeeling as they claim if he can turn down this invitation.

He hesitates. He knows what he is supposed to do. And he knows what he wants to do. And those two things are diametrically opposed.

"Sara," he says, his voice soft and strained. He makes a low whimpering sound. She is supposed to help him. They have an agreement, though they've never discussed it openly. He isn't supposed to have to resist her like this. He isn't sure he can be strong enough for both of them. The silence between them is thick and heavy. He waves a hand between them helplessly. "I don't know what to do about this."

"I do," she says simply. And he believes her. He gazes at her, his expression softening, and takes in the cuts on her beautiful face, and the hope in her eyes, and for one second he wants to say yes. He wants to drop the briefcase full of files and the page from his rolodex and cradle her face in his hands and kiss her the way he's been dying to kiss her since he first laid eyes on her in that lecture hall in San Francisco.

But he also knows she's not in her right mind. She's in shock. She's taking risks she wouldn't normally take. She wants this now. She's willing to take the risk today. But tomorrow? Next week? When the fall out comes, she will regret this moment. And she will hate him for being weak when she needs him to be strong.

"You know, by the time you figure it out, it really could be too late," she says. She turns and walks away, and he has to stop himself from going after her. He takes a step. He watches her go. And he tells himself that he did the right thing.

But he honestly has no idea what the right thing is anymore.

He only knows how much it hurts to think about it being too late.

6.

He notices the box on his desk the second he enters the room. His office is full of stuff, but it is his stuff, and he knows everything that belongs. This box does not belong.

It is not his birthday. Or Christmas. Not that he generally receives gifts for either of those anyway. Not at work. His mother always sends a gift, but she sends it to his home. Regardless, it's wrapped in colorful paper with a bow on top, so it appears to be a gift.

He moves behind his desk, shakes the box, and smiles at the muffled rattle.

"I can just see you at eight years old on Christmas morning." She's leaning against his door jam smirking.

He waits, the question unspoken between them.

She nods. "Open it."

He does, and then he laughs. It's a Logos set. Just last week, they finished an investigation into a murder at a Logos tournament.

"You seemed like you were having fun," she says, and her voice is so sweet, with just a hint of teasing. "Even if you did miss vixens."

He smiles. It's been so long since they played their game. When she rearranged the tiles he was working with, and then gave him a flirty smile and told him he missed one, fire had pulsed through him.

Things between them have been good for months. They're working well together, having fun. Like they used to in the beginning.

After the Marlin case, when he was so broken imagining Sara's face on Debbie's body, he wasn't sure he would ever be able to work with her again. He's so glad he was wrong.

They are friends again. He loves working with her best. This case felt like back in the beginning, when he couldn't wait for her to get to work so they could play.

She saunters over to his desk, and watches him open the box and extract the tiles. He sifts them through his fingers, then plucks eight of them from the velvet bag. He steps closer to her, their bodies almost touching, and reaches his arm around her, dropping the tiles in a pile in front of her on the desk. She turns and looks up at him, and he grins.

She purses her lips, trying to hold back a smile, and he raises an eyebrow, issuing a silent challenge.

She spreads the tiles out in front of her, and he can see the gears of her mind working. He loves watching her think. He knows when she sees it. She gives up on holding back the smile, and it spreads across her face. Her best, widest smile. The one that always makes his heart skip a beat.

With one finger, she slides the tiles until they form a single phrase. "Thank you".

"You're welcome," she says softly. And then she hesitates, and he can tell there's something else she wants to say. He waits, giving her time.

"Remember that case Nick was working on last month? The dead woman under the prison bus?"

He nods, shifting gears. This is not where he thought this conversation was going.

"I was in the trace lab, when he and Hodges were trying to figure out the discoloration on the vic's arm. It was a tattoo. Made with carminic acid. From a cochineal."

He nods again. "I saw the report. That was a good catch."

She hesitates again, biting her lip nervously. "I might have mentioned that I read about it in the book you gave me for Christmas last year. I didn't think- I mean, I just assumed…."

He nods, understanding immediately. "You assumed that I give Christmas gifts to the whole team?" he finishes quietly.

"Last year we were barely speaking to each other," she says, her eyes falling from his face to the tiles on his desk. She reaches out and pushes them around nervously. "I figured it was just an obligation. You had to get me something if you were getting everyone else something."

"You've never been an obligation, Sara," he says, his heart tight in his chest.

She looks up at him, and the longing in her eyes leaves him breathless. There is a long, painful silence, and then she looks away and takes a shallow breath. Her eyes return to his, and he sees that the longing is replaced by uncertainty. "I wouldn't have said anything about the book if I had realized."

"It's fine, Sara," he says. "There's no rule that says I can't buy you a present."

He wonders, for just a moment, what other secrets she could keep. They could keep. He has spent five years hiding his feelings for her. Hiding from his feelings for her. What if they hid together?

"Thank you," she says. "I know I've always thanked you for your gifts at the time. But knowing…. Just…thank you."

He nods, thinking of the gifts he's given her over the years. Always something work related, something that could plausibly be explained as a gift from a supervisor to a member of his team. He tries not to think about the gifts he wishes he could give her.

"Hey, Grissom," Greg says from the doorway. "I got a match on those prints. You're going to want to see this."

He tells Greg he will be right there, and then he sweeps the puzzle she has solved back into the bag, hesitating only a moment before pulling ten more tiles from the bag and leaving them in a pile in front of her.

He nods his goodbye and then follows Greg down the hall. When he returns, Sara is gone, but the tiles have been arranged to spell out "my pleasure". And to his delight, another pile of letters waits for him beside his message.

The puzzles become a part of their daily routine. They leave clues about the cases they are working, about authors and poets they have referenced throughout the day, even once a puzzle within a puzzle when she leaves him the answer to the last clue missing from his crossword.

When a rollercoaster car careens off the track at a local amusement park, he leaves her "sabotage". And after they banter about Henry James and The Turn of the Screw, she leaves him "ghost".

They are caught up in the investigation after that. Too busy for games. The case itself is their puzzle, and they solve it piece by piece.

As they are wrapping it up, he finds a new pile waiting for him, and he picks at it for hours until he finds "cite your source". And then he feels the rush of adrenaline, remembering their conversation before Greg swabbed the seatbelt for semen. The release of epinephrine and adrenaline causes a stimulatory effect, enhancing ejaculation, he had told them.

She's flirting with him. Like they used to. Before he can stop himself, he's pulling out the tiles to spell out "mile high club".

He's gone from his office for the next six hours, but when he returns to finish the paperwork, there is a new pile of tiles beside his message. And it takes him only a minute to puzzle it out. "Overrated".

He sits for a long time staring at the tiles when he is supposed to be doing paperwork. Finally he finishes his work, sweeps away the tiles, and pulls out ten more.

It takes her two days to solve it, and his anxiety grows by the hour. The puzzle is a simple one. The only challenge to it is knowing to split it into three small words. He doesn't know if she is struggling with the puzzle, making it harder than it is, or if she has figured it out but can't solve it for him until she settles on an answer.

On Friday, he arrives at work an hour early, but she is already somewhere in the building. Because she was gone when he left for the day, and the puzzle is sitting on his desk, deciphered. "Ride with me".

He should have known her answer will not be a simple yes or no. That would be too easy. But it takes him only a minute to unscramble the tiles. "My pleasure".

When he looks up, she is in the doorway smiling at him.

After work, in the dusky quiet of the early morning, he takes her to his favorite rollercoaster, and she smiles at him as they fasten their buckles.

They are alone in the car, and as it ticks slowly up the track to top of the first hill he cannot hold back the smile. He cannot remember the last time he was this happy. He turns to look at her, and sees his happiness reflected back to him in her smile. For the first time in a long time, he isn't just happy, he's hopeful. He does not know what is happening between them, how they will solve this riddle of a relationship. But she is the smartest person he's ever met. And if anyone can do it, it's her.

He wants, desperately, to kiss her. But he settles for holding her hand. And then suddenly they are cresting the hill, racing down the track. Together.

Less than 48 hours later, she eyes him warily, crouching on the floor of the garage at the far bumper of Sam Braun's limo, and tells him she knows he recommended Nick for the key position. When she releases the tape measure, it retracts loudly, skittering across the floor back to him, and he can't help but imagine her severing the tenuous new beginning between them, sending it skittering back to him as well.

It has been months since he wrote his recommendation. And though he had his reasons at the time – chief among them, Nick's facility with interpersonal relationships and his own disinclination to squander Sara's time with paperwork when she belongs in the field – none of that feels sufficient to offer her as an explanation. He bumbles the conversation terribly.

She told him once that she wanted to make sure that whatever happened – or didn't happen – between them would not affect his recommendation. He was so appalled by the thought of it, he was stunned into silence. Before he could gather his thoughts, she apologized, muttering her frustration about overtalking around him, and walked away. Now, he wonders if she thinks his silence proves his guilt – if she thinks he is punishing her for the crime of loving her both too much and not enough.

He wonders also if she thinks he has made this decision to protect himself against accusations of favoritism should their relationship progress and come to light; if he is sacrificing her career advancement on the altar of his indecision.

It is sickening to contemplate this silent, imagined accusation. More sickening still: his fear that this accusation could have merit.

Later, in his office, his eyes are drawn automatically to the tiles spelling out "my pleasure", and he can't believe it has only been two days since he found her reply to his invitation. He wonders if he can tell her with tiles what he could not with his words.

He lingers over the letters for far too long, finally settling on "you deserve better". He's not sure if he means the position or his explanation, but he knows both are true.

He leaves the tiles in three small piles, reducing the challenge of the puzzle. He wants her to solve this one quickly.

But all week, as they finish one case and then another, she steadfastly avoids him. The tiles never move.

When Catherine tells him that Sara asked to transport the rape kit back to the lab rather than take the victim's statement on their newest case, his selfish sulking morphs into concern for her. This is not like Sara.

He finds her in the hall, watching through a window as the victim works with the forensic artist. He tries to have a conversation with her about vacation days, but she wants nothing to do with the conversation or with him. He leaves her to her work, and he doesn't see her for the rest of the day.

After they wrap the case, he sees Sara leave with Nick and Warrick, and he bites back the jealousy. His eyes go to the three small piles of round white tiles on the corner of his desk, and with a sinking sense of resignation, he sweeps them into their velvet bag and tucks the set into his desk drawer.

Two hours later, she is sitting, body slumped and eyes downcast, while a uniformed police officer tells him that the officer who pulled her over cut her a break and didn't book her, but he still had to notify her supervisor.

He crosses the room slowly and sits beside her, painfully aware that he is the last person in the world she wants to see right now. He reaches over and curls his hand around hers, careful to keep any hint of censure or judgment from his voice as he offers to drive her home.

She doesn't respond immediately, and they are frozen for a moment like that, side by side, hand in hand. Just waiting.

---

7.

He hates this part of the job. Budget shortfalls. Administrative paperwork. Staff schedules.

It's worse now than it's ever been with Catherine supervising swing and half his team gone with her. He's short on bodies, short on money, and short on patience. Sometimes he misses the days when this was all Jim's responsibility, and he was just out in the field.

As soon as he hears the tentative tap on his door frame, he knows it's her. His nervous system reacts automatically to her presence, silently reaching out for her.

"Hi. You got a minute?" she asks brightly. She doesn't wait for his response, striding casually into his office.

He hesitates for just a moment. He always has time for her, but he's trying to puzzle out why she's here. Despite her smile, she's radiating nervous energy. "Sure," he says.

"We really haven't had a chance to talk since the staff changes," she says, sitting. Her smile falters. "I wanted to let you know I said some things to Ecklie that might have done the team a disservice."

Oh. This is why she's nervous. She thinks this is her fault. It's not.

"Ecklie wanted to break up the team. And he did."

"He asked me if you and I had had our post-PEAP counseling session-"

"And we didn't," he says, cutting her off before she can say more. He does not want her to apologize to him again for that night. He doesn't want to see the guilt and shame in her eyes. This is why he hasn't followed up with her. He knows that makes him a bad supervisor. A bad administrator. But he has a hard time being both a boss and a friend to Sara. He always has. "Regardless, you should never have to cover for your boss. I'm sorry."

"You've always been a little more than a boss to me," she says softly.

His stomach drops. He raises his eyes to hers, opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Are they really going to do this now? Here? Like this?

Last spring, he thought they were on the cusp of something new. Back when they spent every free moment at the lab together. When she laughed with him and hovered over his shoulder solving crossword clues before he could get to them. When she left him secret notes in piles of letter tiles. When she held his hand on the rollercoaster.

But things between them always have to be so complicated. Nothing has been the same since he witnessed her shame that night he drove her home. She withdrew from him, throwing herself into work and avoiding any hint of socializing. She took four weeks of vacation over the summer, in two week chunks, eating away at years of banked time off. He has no idea where she went during that time.

He knows that when she came back that second time, she seemed a little better. A little more balanced. But by then the tiles were tucked away in a drawer, gone but not forgotten.

"Why do you think I moved to Vegas?" she asks rhetorically. He knows why. He knows the choice they both made.

He has yet to say a word. His mind is reeling. Maybe she's right. Maybe it's time – past time – to stop talking around this. Five and half years they've been working together, making each other alternately euphoric and miserable.

"Look," she says, carrying on in the face of his mute shock. "I know our relationship has been complicated. It's probably my fault. It's probably, definitely, my fault."

It is not her fault. That's ridiculous.

"You completed your counseling, right?" he asks abruptly, suddenly afraid this conversation is part of some sort of twelve step program, worried that she is looking for closure he is not ready to confer.

"Yeah. Yes."

"And?" he asks.

She gives him a sad, embarrassed grin that looks more like a grimace. "Let's just say…sometimes I look for validation in inappropriate places."

He can't breathe. He has been dreading this moment for seven years. From the moment she smiled up at him under that pier, he has suspected that her feelings for him are misplaced, confused.

She does not love him. She has never loved him. He is a teacher, a mentor, a father figure even. He is someone whose approval she has been seeking desperately for years, and both of them have misinterpreted it at times as something more. But she knows now, and she is telling him, that's all it is.

He can't meet her eyes. He can't find words. He tries to tell himself that he has always known this. That this is not a revelation. He reminds himself that this is why he chose job and not relationship. He knew this day would come, and he was protecting both of them from the fallout.

But he still feels like he can't breathe. It wasn't supposed to hurt this bad if he chose job. That was the deal.

"Look," he says, desperately trying to right himself "Let's um…"

"It's okay," she says softly, taking pity on him. "Okay. You know what? We did our session. Don't forget to document this for Ecklie."

She smiles at him, to let him know that the Ecklie comment is just a joke. That she's on his side, not Ecklie's. But he has forgotten how to smile. Forgotten how to pretend that everything is okay.

"Right," he says, focusing on breathing in and out.

"Thanks," she says, smiling again. And then she stands and goes.

He sits in the dark for a long time, not doing anything. Not even thinking. His mind is empty and quiet, as if it's scared to process what has happened.

The loss is like a physical wound, open and weeping. He realizes with a sudden clarity that he always believed they would somehow find a way to be together. That with enough time he would find the courage, find the words, to make that future possible. Visions of a different future, one without her, flood his mind's eye, and he drops his head into his hands, massaging his temples as if he can scrub them away.

He watches her carefully over the next few days, expecting to find her lighter, relieved of the burden of the dysfunctional push and pull of their relationship.

Instead, what he sees worries him. On the surface, she is as she has ever been. Competent. Professional. Dedicated. Thorough. But her eyes never sparkle anymore. And her smile is sad.

He thought she was doing so much better, after the vacations he pushed her to take, but he wonders now if he was just seeing what he wanted to see. He remembers her, sitting on a bench outside an interrogation room a few months ago, telling him she had a problem with the wife-swapping lifestyle of their current suspects. He remembers giving her a cup of tea and a mouthful of platitudes about consenting adults and their claims of a happy marriage. He remembers how confused he felt when she looked at him sadly and said, "You think they're happy?"

Maybe he cannot even recognize happiness anymore. Maybe she has been unhappy for so long that he doesn't even know what it looks like and is willing to accept a poor imitation.

She appears at the end of shift one day in the gray suit he loves her in so much, and reminds him that she's meeting that morning with the district attorney to go over evidence in the Malton case before it goes in front of the judge.

He nods sympathetically. That case was hard on everyone involved – they had been looking for evidence in one case only to stumble across the emaciated body of a little boy, starved to death and thrown away like garbage. It was Sara who talked to his foster siblings, Sara who discovered he had two brothers, Sara who found them and rescued them. He wasn't there, but he heard that the oldest brother clung to her as they waited for the paramedics.

Cases with children are hard for everyone. Even him. Especially him. He expects her to be heartbroken, but it's not sadness he sees in her eyes. It's a quiet, seething fury.

"It should be an easy conviction," he says gently, trying to offer her a silver lining.

"They aren't going to charge the mother," she replies instead.

It was the mother's cousin who starved and neglected the boys. The mother was states away, sending money back for their care. There is no evidence she knew they were in danger.

He doesn't say any of this to her. She knows.

"She'll have to live with the consequences of her actions for the rest of her life," he says instead. "There's no greater punishment than to lose her child."

Her eyes are hard, her voice flinty. "What about justice for the boys who survived? Who were tortured and watched their brother die? She left her children with a monster. It was her job to protect them, and she just…."

She trails off, and he can see that there are no words that will comfort her right now. He longs to go to her, to hold her. Instead, he just nods.

After a few seconds, she sighs and hands him a stack of paperwork. Her current case is all wrapped up. He wishes he could offer her the night off since she's in between cases and going to be spending who knows how many hours with the DA today, but he's too short staffed.

He knows Sara: she wouldn't take it anyway.

He thanks her, and wishes her luck with the DA, and watches her walk away, wishing there was more he could do. And then he turns off his lights and heads out too.

He's back at the lab hours before his next shift starts, giddy with excitement because he's heard Catherine's got two bodies she dug up in a slab of tar. He books it to the layout room where Catherine and Doc Robbins are going over the x-rays, and then convinces Catherione to take him to see the bodies, and then to let him try to separate them using liquid Nitrogen.

It works. Sort of. He gets the bodies separated, and they unearth the first without a hitch. But when he pulls the chunk of frozen tar from the second skeleton's face, her forehead comes with it, and the skull collapses on itself.

He grimaces, then looks at his watch and makes noises about starting his shift.

"No, no, no," Catherine says. "You're not just going to destroy the skull and then split."

He offers her Sara, since she's just wrapped a case. Catherine is not pleased with him, but Sara does fantastic reconstruction work. Catherine will forgive him.

He's immersed in his own case that night, and has only the barest idea of what's going on with Catherine's. He does see the reconstruction of the victim's face sitting in the layout room at one point, and he smiles. It's excellent work.

He's out at a scene, well past quitting time, when the dustup happens. But he hears all about it when he gets back.

Catherine's in his office within minutes of his return, looking both exhausted and furious.

"Ecklie wants her head," she warns him, and it doesn't appear she has any interest in helping him save Sara's job.

She has sparred with Sara plenty of times, but this time seems different. Eventually she tells him exactly what Sara said to her – yelled at her in a crowded hallway, no less – and he understands why.

"I'm sorry, Cath," he says gently. "That was uncalled for."

"Stop apologizing for her and do something about it," she says. She pauses and then shrugs. "Though I don't know what you can do at this point. Ecklie wants her gone. She's suspended for a week, but it's just a formality."

She's right. Before he can formulate a plan, Ecklie is in his office demanding he fire Sara, and lighting into him for allowing her to make it this far, for covering for her for so long. He doesn't dignify those accusations, but he does defend her. She's his best CSI, and no one has ever complained about the caliber of her work.

Ecklie rolls his eyes. "Handle it," he demands as he turns and storms out of the office.

He sits at his desk for a long time, frustrated with Sara's anger and her inability to control it. She's so angry all the time. At suspects. At coworkers. At the world. At him.

He thinks back to happier times, when she was sweet and flirty with him, but he knows those memories are only half true. She was angry even then.

He thinks about Scott Shelton, the first time he ever saw her rage, and the feel of her writhing in his arms, flailing with fury. He thinks about her up all night trying to identify the victim in the ICU, beaten nearly to death but clinging to life. He thinks about how he encourages her to take a break, only to be cut to the quick when she lashes out and tells him she wishes she was like him and didn't feel anything.

They have all done everything they know to do to mitigate her tempers. He has defended her. Catherine has challenged her. Nick has comforted her. Warrick has reasoned with her. Ecklie has threatened her. And still, here they are. She nearly tanked her career last year with that DUI, and he was so relieved for her that she caught a break. But here they are again, and he doesn't know if he can fix this for her.

He thinks back even farther, to the first time he saw her yell at the other members of the team. The airplane murder. They'd had such fun solving it. But later, after they put it together, after Warrick and Catherine both confessed that they could see themselves as part of a mob like that under the right circumstances, she had been incensed.

For once, he had not incurred her wrath. A flush goes through him, as he remembers how he felt when she looked at him after that conversation. How flattered he had been by her admiration because it wasn't hero worship, because he had felt truly seen by her.

He had told her then – told all of them – they were looking at it wrong. They were looking at it from the mob's point of view. It took five people to kill that man on the plane. If just one person had stopped and taken the time to look at him, to listen to him, to figure out what was wrong with him, it might have taken only one person to save his life.

He knows suddenly what he needs to do. He needs to know why.

He has never been to Sara's new apartment. He had been to her old one, the tiny high rise studio she rented in a rush when he asked her to join him in Vegas. He had toured apartments with her, had given her advice about neighborhoods and commute times, telling himself it was the least he could do since she didn't know anyone else in town. After she went back to San Francisco for her things, she invited him over for breakfast after their shift, so he could see it furnished.

She lived there for two years. He never set foot in it again.

When she moved out of that apartment, he knew she moved a little farther out, trading a longer commute for a bigger place. She hired a moving company for her furniture, but Nick and Greg had helped her move boxes and unpack. He listened to them laugh and joke in the breakroom about whether Sara actually needed all those boxes of books and what had been in the boxes labeled, "Private. Stay out, Greg."

She had caught him listening, and smiled at him. She said he'd have to come check out her new place sometimes, see how much bigger it was than the last place. But it has been three years, and he's never seen it.

It's a standard apartment complex, with a gated entry and exterior exits for each of the units and signs that indicate at least two different pools and a set of tennis courts. He wonders if she ever uses any of the amenities she pays for.

He waves his badge at the security guard at the gate, and weaves his way through the complex until he finds her unit. He still has no idea what he's going to say to her. He is hoping the words will come to him in the moment.

She doesn't seem surprised to see him.

"Well, if you're here it can't be good," she says, lingering in the doorway. She's changed from her work clothes into jeans and a zippered hoodie and she has a beer in her hand.

"Can I come in?" he asks.

She steps aside and waves him in, her smile hard and mirthless. "Want to ask me if I'm drunk?"

"We both know that's not your problem," he says immediately. "I spoke to Catherine."

She sighs. "Ecklie?"

"He wants me to fire you." They are beyond kid gloves at this point.

She takes a deep breath and exhales sadly. "I figured."

She pastes on an unperturbed look and brightens her voice. "Can I get you anything?"

"Sure," he says. "An explanation."

"I lost my temper," she says, making her way into the living room. It's painted a warm purple with matted photos on the walls. The furniture is all new, and looks somehow both fashionable and comfortable. She has made a nice home for herself here. He hopes she will be willing to fight to keep it.

"That seems to be happening quite a bit. Do you know why?"

"What difference does it make?" she asks, frustrated and resigned all at once. "I'm still fired."

"It makes a difference to me," he says softly. And it does. Whether he can save her job or not, whether she wants to save her job or not, he cares. He wants to understand her.

She rolls her eyes, and begins the litany. "I have a problem with authority. I choose men who are emotionally unavailable," she says, gesturing to him and holding his gaze. "I'm self destructive. All of the above."

He wants desperately to perseverate on that second point, not just the fact that she is boldly discussing what usually goes unspoken between them, but the fact that she is talking about it in the present tense, after she told him last week that their relationship was just her looking for validation in inappropriate places.

But he pushes that thought aside. Today is not about him. It's not even about them. It's about her.

"Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?" He can see immediately that she doesn't recognize the quote. She's used to him quoting Shakespeare and Henry James. "It's from The Big Chill. One of the characters explaining a basic fact of life: that rationalizations are more important to us than sex even."

"I am not rationalizing anything," she says dismissively, sitting in the living room chair facing him. "I crossed the line with Catherine and I was…insubordinate to Ecklie."

"Why?" he asks gently, and he can see that this response catches her off guard. She's expecting him to lecture her, to argue with her.

"Leave it alone," she warns.

"No, Sara." He keeps his voice gentle, but he's not going to leave until he understands.

"What do you want from me?" she asks, and the anger in her voice sounds suspiciously like fear.

"I want to know why you're so angry."

She holds his gaze silently, and he can see her war with herself. Tears pool in her eyes, and she shakes her head, averting her gaze. "I can't," she says softly.

He walks toward her slowly, giving her time to anticipate his movements. He can see her approaching the point of fight or flight, and he doesn't want to startle her.

He sits on the couch facing her, but she looks straight ahead, avoiding eye contact.

"Talk to me," he says. "Forget about Catherine and Ecklie and the case and your job. Just talk to me. Tell me why you're so angry."

She shakes her head slowly. "I can't," she says again. "I don't know how."

"You know how to talk to me," he counters. "You've never been afraid to tell me hard truths."

She looks at him for a moment, and he can see that she wants to tell him but is scared. He has long suspected that there is A Thing – that the source of her anger and single-minded pursuit of justice is not a quirk of her personality or a general sense of duty to the world, but that something has happened to her that makes her the way she is.

On her angriest days, he has silently speculated. He knows domestic violence cases are the hardest for her. He wonders about her past boyfriends. She was so young when she started at Harvard, just sixteen, and he can imagine her falling victim to a boyfriend who seemed so charming at first. He hopes it is not that. He hopes, heartless as it may be, that it is a friend, a roommate, someone she loved whose body bore the bruises, because it pains him to imagine her hurt and scared.

But it is much worse than he imagined.

"I've never told anyone this," she whispers. "The people who knew…I didn't tell them."

He waits, silently, scared that if he interrupts, even just to offer support, she will stop talking and not start again.

She begins slowly, haltingly, but finally begins to settle into her story. She talks for a long time about a childhood full of yelling and fighting and abuse; about a mother who was schizophrenic and a father who responded to his wife's illness by screaming at her and calling her crazy. She talks about abusers who are too smart to hit their wives and children where the bruises will show, and authorities who don't believe women, especially women with a history of mental health issues. These are issues he has heard her talk about many times, but this time she isn't talking in theoreticals.

She tells him about lying to the emergency room doctors about falling down the stairs, falling off her swing, falling through the sliding glass door. She tells him about the day she decided she was too old to hide under her bed and had an obligation to protect her mother. She tells him about throwing herself between her parents, only to have her mother attack her, screaming obscenities and accusing her of being sent to spy on her.

Just when he thinks he can take no more, when his heart is so broken for her that he feels physically ill, she pauses. When she starts talking again, her tone has changed, and he can see that she has retreated further into herself.

"It's funny the things that you remember and the things that you don't," she says. "There was a smell of iron in the air. Castoff on the bedroom wall. There was this young cop puking his guts. I don't remember the woman who took me to foster care. I can't remember her name. Which is strange, you know, because I couldn't let go of her hand."

"Well, the mind has its filters," he says eventually, keeping his voice calm while his mind is screaming. Not this. Anything but this. Not Sara at eleven years old discovering her first crime scene.

"I do remember the looks. I became the girl whose father was stabbed to death."

He tries not to react, not to show his surprise that it is her father whose body she discovered, not her mother's.

"Do you think there's a murder gene?" she asks, and her voice is so pitiful; her eyes are so vulnerable.

"I don't believe that genes are a predictor of violent behavior," he says firmly.

"You wouldn't know that in my house. The fights. The yelling. The trips to the hospital. I thought it was the way that everyone lived. When my mother killed my father, I found out that it wasn't."

She begins to cry, finally, and he is overwhelmed by his love for her. There's nothing he can say to make this less painful for her, but he needs her to know that he's there. That she hasn't scared him away. That he isn't repulsed by her story. He leans forward and slides his hand into hers, and his heart contracts when she curls her fingers around his.

She cries for a long time, but he doesn't move. He will stay with her for as long as she needs. Finally she gets up and walks away, and he is unsure what is happening, and whether he is being dismissed, until he realizes she has gone to the bathroom.

When she comes back, her face is washed and her tears are gone, but her eyes are red and full of apprehension.

He reaches out a hand to her, and he sees a tiny ghost of a smile as she passes the chair where she had been sitting and comes to sit beside him on the couch. He takes her hand again, and she hesitates just a second before resting her head on his shoulder. It's easier for her not to make eye contact right now, he realizes, and that's fine with him.

He strokes her hand gently with his thumb. "I'm so glad you told me that," he said. "So glad you trusted me enough to tell me."

"I don't want to be that girl again," she says sadly. "When I left California and moved to Cambridge, I just…never talked about it again. And I've always trusted you, but…I don't want you to think about that when you look at me. I don't want you to see that girl when you look at me."

"No, honey," he says, the endearment slipping out just like it did once before. "This doesn't change anything about how I see you. It just helps me understand."

As they sit there in silence, his mind wanders back to her litany of rationalizations earlier, and he hears her say again, "I choose men who are emotionally unavailable." He does not know if there is a possibility of a future between them, or if he is too late, or if she just forgot momentarily that his attention is just inappropriate validation. Today is not the day to explore that. But he wants to show her that he is not emotionally unavailable. She needs him to be her friend, and he can be that.

"Sara," he says softly.

She lifts her head and looks at him, her expression guarded.

"I'm going to go back to the lab," he says. "I'm going to talk to Ecklie. I'm going to do everything I can to fix this."

She nods, and he sees a glimmer of hope in her eyes, and warms at her unshakable faith in him.

"When it's done, I'll come back here and tell you about it," he says.

Her eyebrows shoot up, but she nods. He stands and walks to the door, and she walks with him. In the doorway, he hesitates, and they assess each other silently.

His gaze falls to her lips, and the moment swells between them. But today is not for romance.

He remembers them years ago, outside a crime scene, covered in drywall dust, and the comfort she offered him. He reaches out and cradles her cheek, rubbing his thumb against her soft skin.

"I'll bring dinner," he adds.

She smiles a real smile for the first time in so long, and he is relieved to discover that he has not forgotten what happiness looks like.

---

8.

Ever since the night he reappeared on her doorstep with salads from her favorite deli and told her that her job was safe, things between them have changed. They are spending lots of time together now, outside of work, having breakfast together regularly and relaxing together at her home or his, watching movies and talking. Once her suspension is over, they are working together again too, more happily now.

There is still the charged energy sometimes, the tension between them when they straddle the line between friends and…more. He's still not sure what to do about it, not sure either of them is ready to take that final step over the line. He knows though, that they are getting closer, and that as scary as it may be, it's far less scary than the future he imagined without her. She seems to enjoy those moments again, too, like she used to in the beginning.

But today, something isn't right. They're in her kitchen. She's making coffee while he scrambles eggs, and he can feel the old anger crackling in her. He wants to ask her what's wrong, but he doesn't know how.

He doesn't think it's work. She and Greg just wrapped up a boring breaking and entering case while he and Sofia worked a suspected murder that turned out to be natural causes. Before that, they all worked together to solve the murder of a young mother who died after a night out with friends. None of that would upset her.

She pours water into the machine, sloshing some over the side, and mutters a curse. She's definitely angry.

He continues stirring the eggs, giving her time to work out what she wants to say to him.

"Sofia seems to be settling in," she says finally. "Greg thinks she's fitting in nicely."

"Yeah," he says. "I know she's upset about the demotion, but we can benefit from her experience."

"I heard she wanted to quit," she says.

He says nothing, keeping his back to her as he removes the eggs from the heat.

"Well," she says, and her voice is so sharp it slices right through him. "You can be very persuasive when you want someone to stay

He opens a cabinet and pulls out plates for each of them, plating the eggs and adding the vegetarian bacon he already browned and some fruit.

"Did you tell her the lab needs her?" she asks. "Was that enough to convince her to stay?"

He turns to look at her finally, and sees not just anger but betrayal in her eyes. And fear.

"The lab does need her," he says gently. "The team is short staffed. Greg has only been credentialed for a few weeks and can't work independently. We need her."

"You need her?" she counters.

"No," he says immediately. "No, Sara."

"How was dinner?" she asks. "I guess you knew exactly what to do about…that."

She's throwing their whole, complicated history in his face, and he would be angry if she wasn't so obviously in pain. She's never more angry than when she's hurting.

"Dinner was fine," he says calmly. "I expensed it. It served its purpose. I'm glad she decided to stay."

"You seem to enjoy working with her," she says.

He takes a slow breath. "I do. Just like I enjoyed working with Catherine. And Warrick. And Nick. I think you would enjoy working with her too, if you gave her a chance."

He hands her a plate.

"I made the eggs just the way you like," he says gently. "I got free range eggs and that ridiculously overpriced gruyere from the farmer's market."

He sees her eyes soften as she hears his unspoken message.

"How does Sofia like her eggs?" she asks quietly, and he knows she is giving him an opening, not making an accusation.

"I have no idea," he says, and she smiles at him shyly. He smiles back, and she blushes and shakes her head, averting her eyes. He can see that she's embarrassed about this entire conversation, but he's glad it's out there. He's glad she brought it up rather than letting it fester.

The coffee pot beeps, and he hands her his plate. "Take those to the table. I'll make our coffees," he says. And then, before she can turn, he reaches out and strokes her cheek.

This thing between them, he still does not know what to do about it. But he is getting closer to figuring it out.

As winter slides toward spring, things continue much the same as they have.

At work, Sara softens to Sofia, and he was right: they do enjoy working together. Greg is coming along too, thanks in large part to Sara's mentoring.

He thinks Ecklie assigned him Greg in the split as an insult, taking his two most experienced team members and leaving him Sara — who they all know would quit rather than being reassigned — and Greg, whose credentials were so new the ink wasn't even dry on the paperwork.

But Ecklie doesn't know the first thing about team building, and he has no idea that he's done them a favor by keeping Sara and Greg together. She is the best at what she does, and she is an excellent teacher. That and the fact that Greg adores her and is always eager to impress her, means he is progressing faster than anyone could have predicted.

Outside of work, things are much the same as well. They spend most of their free time together now. It's become so routine, they have begun to take it for granted and only discuss their schedules when other plans force them to spend time apart.

Though they started off rotating pretty evenly between his place and hers, lately they default to her place. It's not because he doesn't like having her in his home — on the contrary, he's beginning to find it quiet and lonely without her. It's just that her place feels more comfortable, more warm and welcoming. It's small and cozy compared to his condo, but it's not really about the size. Everything is bright and cheerful and welcoming at her place. There are pillows and throw blankets and framed photos everywhere. It feels like home.

Sometimes they venture out, though usually not anywhere too public. Mostly out into nature, hiking and exploring. She likes to bring a camera, and he has come to realize that many of the nature and landscape photographs in her apartment are photos she has taken. On one of their hikes, at the summit of the trail, a bubbly woman in her twenties offers to take a photo of the two of them, and Sara hesitates before handing her camera over, looking at him for his permission.

He nods encouragingly, and she gives him a smile so wide his heart feels like it will explode. Two weeks later, he sees that same smile in the photograph. The thrill he feels when he finds it framed and sitting on her desk in her living room surprises him.

They're nearing the end of a relatively boring shift when the call comes in about the 4-19 in the hotel room. He and Sara go with Brass and find a flight attendant stabbed to death on the bed.

They process the room, which has been cleaned thoroughly, and then he meets Doc Robbins at the morgue for a rundown of autopsy results.

When Ecklie pages him with an oblique message about having additional details about the case, he sends Sara in his place. He tells her he's in the middle of something, and it's not a lie, but he also wants to force Ecklie to work with her. Aside from a brief conversation when she returned from her suspension, she and Ecklie are still dancing around one another, each pretending the other doesn't exist.

Things between Sara and Catherine are much more repaired, thankfully. He would like to take partial credit for that given his intercessions to Catherine on Sara's behalf. But if he's honest, it's Sara's apology — as genuine as it is voluntary — that softens Catherine.

For as much as she and Sara have fought over the years, he knows Catherine cares about Sara and understands how the job can wear on a person. Once she's past her offense to Sara's attack, she's mostly worried. He does not tell Catherine anything that Sara told him that day when she finally opened up to him, but he does ask her to trust him when he tells her that Sara has her reasons for being sensitive, and that he and she are both working toward handling those emotions better.

Catherine has moved on, and it's past time that Ecklie accepts that Sara isn't going anywhere and treats her as the integral part of the team that she is. So, he sends Sara in his stead to gather whatever evidence Conrad has for him.

The next time he sees her, Sara is practically vibrating with the focused in-the-zone energy he loves to see in her.

When they first saw their victim, stabbed to death in her hotel bed, he worried that the case might be emotional for her. He's been watching her surreptitiously all day, looking for signs that she is thinking about her father, thinking about that terrible night. But she seems fine, and he doesn't think she's faking it.

It's amazing, honestly, how much better she seems to be doing now than she was just a couple months ago. There have been a few rough cases for her since the day she told him about her childhood and the night that changed her life, but instead of shutting down and lashing out, she comes to him now and they talk about it, or don't talk and just sit quietly together until she's feeling better.

She tells him all about the algorithm to remove the background pattern on the sheets and isolate the bloody fingerprint from Ecklie's cold case, and he takes the print to the judge, but fails to come back with a warrant.

That barely slows her down. The next thing he knows, Sara has met with the suspect's wife, rattling her enough that she makes a phone call to warn her husband, and Sara has tracked his cell phone to within two blocks of a certain cell phone tower then checked hotel registrations in that area, finding the suspect registered at the Tangiers.

"Well done," he says softly when she's finished rattling off her findings. She smiles, clearly pleased with his praise, but also just pleased with herself. He is worrying less and less lately about inappropriate validation. The more time they spend together, the more he understands that their need for validation from each other is both mutual and appropriate.

Before he can say anything else, Greg bursts into the room and informs him that the semen collected from rape kit is positive for cocaine. They don't normally run drug screens on rape kit samples, and he says as much. But Greg counters that their suspect has a record for cocaine possession and distribution, so he ordered the test.

He looks back and forth between Sara and her protege and smiles broadly. "Wow, you guys are rendering me obsolete," he says.

Their suspect, it turns out, is not the killer. Just the cocaine dealer for the first victim, who found her body and ran before he could be blamed. It does not take them long to puzzle out who the actual killer is – the hotel manager. And it takes Sara no time to come up with a trick that leads the man to incriminate himself and give them the location of the evidence he has stolen as a trophy.

She leaves for the day before he does, in a dance that is becoming a familiar routine, and he lingers around the lab for a half hour catching up on paperwork before heading out as well, turning left out of the parking lot instead of right as he has done for years.

It's a really satisfying case, and they are both still a little high on adrenaline when he arrives at her place. He has plans for a mushroom quiche, and she cleans and slices the mushrooms and grates the cheese while he makes a pie crust from scratch. He scoots past her to put the dough in the freezer to chill before he rolls it out, brushing a hand across her waist as he passes.

He loves when they work together like this in her tiny kitchen, especially after working together at the lab all night, where they have to be so conscious of every touch, every look. He pulls the eggs and cream from the fridge and returns to his spot at the counter. She reaches without being asked for the whisk in the jar in front of her and hands it to him. He reaches for it, letting his fingers glide across the back of her hand before closing around the utensil. When he glances at her face, her lips are pursed, and he knows she's trying to hold back a smile. He winks at her, and she gives up all pretense and beams at him.

She is finished with her tasks long before he is, but she lingers in the kitchen with him, chatting about nothing in particular, while he works. Eventually she takes a few steps over to the front door, where his briefcase is sitting, and plucks out the folded newspaper poking out the top.

He smiles at her as she brings it back into the kitchen, laying it on the counter and assessing the half-finished crossword puzzle, and then checks on his pie crust, now baking in the oven.

He hears her give a cluck of censure as he pulls the pie plate from the oven. He sets it down to cool and sees her shaking her head, a smirk on her face, as she picks up a pen.

He moves behind her, so close they are almost touching, and looks over her shoulder to see her filling in the answer. Fourteen across: Bell sister; of the moors. She is printing in her looping script: Emily Bronte. He nods in appreciation. He had forgotten the pseudonyms of the Bronte sisters: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

"Disappointing," she teases, turning to face him. She leans back against the counter so she can look at him, clearly enjoying herself. "You missed a Bronte sister? Really? This is Literature 101. Is it because she's a woman? You need to spend less time rereading your dead old white men and branch out."

"Sara," he says, infusing his voice with as much disapproval as possible.

"Gil," she counters, mimicking his tone, her lips quirking up at the corners.

He loves when she says his name. Loves even more that she only says it like this, when they are alone together. Like it is something special between them. The first time she said it, she held very still after, waiting for his reaction, as if he might not allow it, and he reached out impulsively and squeezed her hand, aching for her to say it again.

He gives in first, laughing, and she joins him, her eyes sparkling. She is so beautiful, truly a "goddess in his eyes".

His laughter quiets as he remembers the rest of the passage, and she looks at him, intrigued and waiting.

"I never told my love vocally," he begins to quote softly. "Still, if looks have a language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last and looked a return - the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame – shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses."

Her teasing smile is gone, and he can see her chest rising and falling slow and steady as she listens to him recite, as she hears his apology in Heathcliff's lines.

When he finishes, she is gazing up at him adoringly, and he is transported back to the day under the pier. But this time, she is not a wide-eyed innocent caught up a little in her hero worship. She is his best friend. She has seen him at his worst, and she is still looking at him like that.

He has never been more acutely aware of how lucky he is. And he knows exactly what to do about this.

He slides his hand from the counter to her waist, gives her a small smile, and raises an eyebrow. He gives her a chance to change her mind, to tell him no. But she is not going anywhere. Instead, she makes a soft sound in her throat as her breath catches in anticipation. He lifts his other hand to her cheek, and then tips his head forward, capturing her mouth with his.

When they part, her cheeks are pink, and her eyes sparkle, and he is somehow more enchanted by her than he already was.

Then she says softly, "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

He should have known that she too would have a quote handy, and that hers would put his to shame. He tries, and fails, to respond and then decides the only possible response is to kiss her again. So he does, and he feels her smile against his mouth and slide one hand up his chest and around the back of his neck, her fingers stroking at his hair and holding him to her as if she cannot get enough of him and does not want to let him go.

He has wondered at times if seven years of waiting has built this moment up to be something more than it is; if they would be disappointed. But as her lips move under his, warm and inviting, he finds it is beyond all his expectations, and worth every moment of the wait.

---

Author's Note: Both quotes from this final chapter as well as the title of this story are taken from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The full line that Sara quotes at the end is: "He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me. It has been such a joy to delve back into these characters and their complicated history and to imagine all the moments in between that we never saw.