Watching

She was watching him as he tucked her daughter into bed and took a seat on the chair beside it, taking out a book and beginning to read it. She was watching him.

Watching him when she had been dancing, the way his eyes had swept passed all the other dancers and rested on her. The way he didn't use some stupid chat up line on her when she saw him later.

Watching him sip at his tea, while they sat in the small café, joking and talking together like old friends, never talking about her work only his, the way his eyes lit up when he mentioned a case that he had solved using science, or when he spoke of some newly discovered species of bug.

Watching him even at her wedding to another man. The way he started to shut himself out from the world, standing in the corner staring into space and a look that she had spent a life time trying to erase from her mind, something between sadness and happiness, she wasn't sure bout as she had watched him she couldn't help feeling guilty.

Watching him when he handed me my first assignment as a CSI. The look of happiness in his eyes as he handed me the card, but also the way he distanced himself from everyone else there. Watching him change from the man she knew to someone different.

Watching him when she had turned up on his doorstep, having been beaten by her 'husband' for the first time, the look in his eyes had been too much for her to take and she had collapsed there and then into the one person that made her feel safe.

Watching him in the nights that followed when she would go to his townhouse with wounds all over her body and deep in her heart, seeking shelter in the arms of the one man she knew she could trust.

Watching him when she told him about the baby, seeing in him the same fears she felt herself yet knowing that as long as he was there for her she could get through anything.

Watching him through tears of betrayal as she discovered his knowledge of the 'other women' in her husbands life.

Watching as the friendship they had built crumbled with the breach of trust, all the time it took to rebuild it and for her to trust him again.

Watching him in the years that followed at every crime scene, the way he always found the evidence to convict the right monster and how if he didn't he would take it so hard, although he would never show it, she had always seen it when she was watching.

Watching him when he would comfort her, telling her that he would always be there for her, even though she wished for so much more than just a friend to comfort her, to her he was more, much more but he didn't know and all she could do was watch and hope that one day he could love her like her 'husband' couldn't.

Watching, always watching.

She was still watching when she noticed his eyelids drop and his breathing become more rhythmic and dream like. She walked into the room and, covering him with the blanket from the bottom of the bed, she kissed the top of his head. He was still her best friend, but now he was so much more and he knew it too. She no longer had to spend time watching him. When she could spend every moment with him watching her.