Chapter Two
Disclaimers, header in Chapter One
Notes: Thanks very much for the reviews, and taking the time to let me know what you think! ;-) And now, Ch. 2…
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As he leaned forward against the window frame, Grissom contemplated the large backlit square of the city that was visible from his living room. He hadn't bought this place for the view, but it never failed to surprise him when he took the time to notice. Vegas was such a strange place to him, even after all these years. Nighttime flash and daytime glitter laid flat in a ring of red mountains. Not at all like the place where he grew up. In California, though Sierras run like a knobby spine all the way down the eastern border of the state, to the west lies nothing but boundless sea and sky. Vegas's vistas were utterly dissimilar but they held other, more unique charms. Charms he could easily savor by merely driving to the outskirts of the city, about thirty minutes beyond the last of the lights and subdivisions. Out there the desert reasserts itself, sprawling brazenly farther than the eye can see, past the mountains, past everything. The best came after sundown, when even on clear, starry nights the profound darkness of that vast expanse overwhelmed his ability to see, hear, or feel…anything. He had learned that if he stood out there long enough, the darkness would quietly it all. Lose yourself, hide yourself; it amounted to the same thing. Privacy.
A paradox, of course--privacy and openness embedded in a landscape. But that was part of what he loved about the desert: the contradiction in terms. He wished, not for the first time, that he could say the same of the other contradiction in his life. The undignified fiasco at the lab told that story all too well, he supposed. Consider it, he commanded himself. In the thirty minutes that elapsed between the soul searching he had done in his office and his hasty retreat from the break room, his emotions had run riot: desire, fear, and jealousy, even anger. In thirty minutes. And all of that…messiness…flooded in because he couldn't control his feelings for her. Despite his best efforts, he simply couldn't do it. How could that much upheaval be reasonable? How could it be bearable, for a man like him?
Grissom turned from the city lights and lowered himself heavily onto his couch. For the first time he could recall, he was exhausted by his own life. When the phone rang, he let it disturb the quiet house for nearly four rings before he reached for it.
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"Hello?"
"Hey." Her throat was suddenly dry. "It's me."
"Sara?"
"Yeah," she replied brightly, ignoring the drumming of her nerves. "What other gravelly-voiced woman would it be?"
The silence lasted just long enough for her lower lip to find its way between her teeth.
"I wouldn't call it gravelly."
She tried again. "No? What would you call it?"
He stared straight ahead, willing the first answer that came to mind to fade away.
"Unexpected. Is there something wrong?"
"No, I…does there need to be?"
More silence. She felt a flush begin its hot creep up her neck.
"No, no, of course not. I'm just…"
Making this as painful as possible. Is that the best you can do? She bit her tongue, hard. The last thing she wanted to do was argue. Somehow, she managed to plaster a smile on her face.
"So. What were you doing before I called?"
His eyes drifted back to the window.
"I was just…reading."
"Reading what?"
He scanned his bookshelves quickly before spotting that day's paper, which lay untouched on the coffee table.
"Just the paper."
She frowned as she considered what she had to work with.
"OK, that will have to do. Open it up to the comics, and read something from Dear Abby."
"What?"
"You heard me. It's towards the back of the paper." Her tone was grim. "I feel like I could use some old-fashioned agony advice right about now."
He started to smile, but wound up making a funny noise in the back of his throat that was just loud enough for Sara to hear. It could have been a snort of disgust or a small laugh; she had no idea.
"Are you in agony at the moment?"
"I'm in something," she muttered.
"Didn't catch that. What did you say?"
"Never mind. Where's my Abby?"
He sighed. "Just a second."
Grissom flipped through the paper until he saw the thumbnail-sized photo he was looking for. There were three letters to choose from. He could not have said why, but his eyes settled on the last one.
"DEAR ABBY,"
"I love my boyfriend, "Joe," with all my heart; however, we have a communication problem. Sometimes I feel he is dodging me or doesn't want to talk to me. Joe thinks our conversations always lead to an argument, so he tries to avoid talking.
Grissom ignored the soft snicker at the other end of the line.
"Joe recently moved six hours away, making it even harder to talk."
"Wait. What?"
"I understand he may be excited about living in a new town, but I feel I deserve a little more respect than I'm getting. I'd like to talk to Joe about this, but every time I call him he ignores my questions and practically hangs up on me. Abby, how can I improve our communication? Signed, ALONE BY THE TELEPHONE."
After silently previewing Abby's answer, Grissom cleared his throat with a strangled cough before continuing.
"DEAR ALONE: I hate to appear negative, but where do you get the idea that this man is your boyfriend?"
It was harder to ignore her giggle.
"It's time to move on, because Joe already has -- physically and emotionally."
By now she was laughing openly. "That woman needs help!"
"Well, I admit that it doesn't look good, but…"
"But what?" Sara asked, incredulous. "It's over, dead, done. How much more proof does she need? Not only does this guy hang up when she calls, he has moved out of town to get away from her. I don't mean to be harsh, but she needs to let it go." She lifted her hand from the steering wheel and gestured emphatically. "There's a simple formula for relationships. Viability is inversely proportional to the decision of either party to put physical distance between them and the frequency of telephone hang-ups. Dead simple equation, really, and one this poor lady needs to learn fast."
"Well, it's not likely to be that simple, is it? People do strange things." His eyes narrowed, even as his voice took on a deceptive mildness. "Like…leaving town to get away from someone. Or," he paused, "to get back at them."
"I don't see any evidence he's trying to get back at her," Sara shot back. "The relationship is over, and he's moving on. Where's your proof that he's the bad guy here?"
"I didn't say anything about bad guys, " he said coolly. "All I'm saying is that he may be rather…mixed up."
"Mixed up? The guy did what he thought he needed to do. I'm not going to criticize him for that without trying to see things from his point of view."
"And what point of view is that?"
"That he had taken all he could take," she replied with a hint of anger. "Who knows what hell that woman put him through before he felt he had to leave."
"Hell?" He repeated, skeptical.
"Hell."
Grissom looked down at his hands. Whatever this feeling was, he didn't like it. Guilt and regret were sensations he instinctively resisted, even when he was at fault, but they were hard to avoid here. Ironically, as angry as she was, it was doubtful that she had guessed even half of the reasons he had treated her so poorly. Like everyone else, she probably would not believe him capable of such purely reactive emotions, rebellions against her boldness, first with him that night as his pulse raced, and later, with someone else he would rather not think about right now.
Sara had said nothing since that last curt word. He waited, his anxiety building, but still she did not speak. He shifted uneasily on the couch, wishing he could see her face. Were he a different sort of man, of course, this would be the perfect time. He could easily suggest that they meet somewhere to talk, and to start this conversation all over again. And for one brave second, he considered it. But as always, in the end he could only be his sort of man. So he did what he could, which was simply to try to keep her on the line.
"So…where are you? I can tell you're on your cell."
She let out a pent-up breath, and focused again on the road. "I'm on my way home; I finished up at the lab a little while ago. And…" She paused as she made the final turn onto her street. "Here I am."
"Oh," he said, reluctantly. "Well…I should say goodnight so you can get something to eat."
She pulled into a space near the entrance to her building, and turned off the engine.
"No, it's okay," she said, sounding more like her normal self. "I'm just having a liquid dinner. As long as you can stand the occasional slurping sounds, I can keep talking."
"Liquid…? Whatever that means, it can't be healthy."
"You know what they say about assuming, Grissom," she drawled. "It's a fresh fruit shake—perfectly healthy. By the time I get home, I've usually lost my appetite. Well, either that, or I've lost the desire to do anything creative about the appetite I do have. Fortunately, however, I own a very good, very expensive blender that takes care of both problems. No reheating in the oven, no microwave, no digging for change for the delivery guy who now knows me on a first name basis." She grinned triumphantly. "Conservation of energy at its finest."
"Is it that hard to make some real food? Good grief."
"You have no idea, Charlie Brown."
He smiled a little. Peanuts was becoming something of a theme for them. In this instance, thankfully, it signaled the return to safer topics of conversation.
"What you need is a strategy. You do one major grocery excursion per week. You pick one day, probably the same day you do the shopping, and cook several things at once. Then you just pack them away in the freezer, in Ziploc bags or even in those Tupperware dishes with the different food compartments, so you can account for the major food groups." He swiveled his head toward the open kitchen area to his left. "I like to use jars myself—excellent flavor preservation. They come in handy for specimens, too, so you get the recycling benefit. But that's up to you, of course. Whichever way you go, the point is that you'll have a complete meal waiting for you every night." He nodded with satisfaction. "It's simple really. You just scope out a method and stick to it."
By this time, Sara had made it past the building's glass doors. She jogged up the stairs to the third floor; the elevator always seemed to take too damn long. She was in the middle of nudging her door open with her foot when she stopped short.
"Grissom. Are you insane? I don't want a method. I don't want a strategy. It's food, not in vitro fertilization. If I have to plan for it that far in advance, I don't want it," she chuffed. "No way am I packing and sorting my food like some paranoid squirrel."
"Packing and sorting…You call me, and somehow I end up the rodent. What's wrong with this picture?"
She grinned, enjoying the vision of the exact expression she was sure he had on his face at that moment. He would be tilting his head to the left right about …now…and working his face into the half-grimace he seemed to reserve for her more colorful comments.
"Well, if I have to be a squirrel, let me offer you a word of advice. Nevada winters are tougher than they seem, and when that cold desert gets going it will bite into your thin hide a lot worse than mine. Now when it does, please don't come scrambling over to my den for any of my carefully stocked provisions. The Lord helps those who help themselves, which means I don't have to."
She clucked her tongue in mid-cackle. "Not very Zen of you, Gris. What happened to sharing the earth's bounty, which belongs to us all?"
"You should have picked a more social animal than the squirrel if you wanted me to share."
"Squirrels are social," she protested laughingly. "You see them running after each other all the time, racing up and down trees…"
He sighed. "They're either fighting over nuts or chasing down a mate, Sara."
"Ah, I see. No sharing allowed, then?"
"No. It's counter-instinctual for them."
"And for you, apparently."
His eyes shifted behind his lenses. "Only where you're concerned."
The odd tone made her laugh, if a bit uncertainly. "O-kay."
"Besides, if you're going to call me a rodent, the least you could have done was to make it something a bit nobler," he explained. "Like a prairie dog."
"Oh, is that where I went wrong?"
His smugness returned. "But of course. Prairie dogs are among the smartest and most social Rodentia. They live in prairie dog towns; they build prairie dog homes. They even have a recognizable family structure, with a papa prairie dog and a mama prairie dog and--"
"Whoa, I get it, Marlin Perkins. How many times were you going to say 'prairie dog'?"
Grissom shrugged. "Hey, don't blame me if you choose poor animal metaphors. You really should brush up on your flora and fauna."
"Heeeee."
He laughed out loud.
The sound, unexpected as it was, sent a crazy kind of warmth shooting through her chest. Finally, she thought. She dropped her bag on the counter and pulled open her refrigerator.
"Well, keep that up and I may even call you again some day."
He frowned. "What do you mean? Do you have to go?"
Her smile widened at the hint of anxious displeasure in his voice. "No," she said innocently, as she poured her dinner into a tall clear glass and moved to the couch.
Grissom's face cleared as he allowed himself to relax against his sofa. He still didn't know what the hell they were talking about, but he didn't care. It was enough just to hear her voice.
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tbc…