A/N: Thanks to Brianna, Lynn, and Mary. You guys are the best.

Part One: Bizarro Universe

It is late August. Sara's been home from her cross-country road trip for two weeks now, and life returns to normal, in a strange, Bizarro Universe sort of way.

Nick notices changes in her since she's been home. She's more open; more friendly; more demonstrative. They go to breakfast every morning, now, the two of them. Sometimes he feels weird and conflicted, especially when she goes on rhapsodically about Cory, the Highway Patrolman from North Dakota whom she met on vacation, and complains about Grissom. He wishes sometimes that she had a girlfriend to confide in instead. Like Catherine, maybe.

She opens herself up to him more every day, like the petals of a flower in the springtime. She confides all sorts of feelings and embarrassing moments, touching his hand when she talks.

His heart refuses to reciprocate. She asks him about women sometimes, but he will not tell her anything. After all, what's there to say? Admitting that lately he's had no life outside of work, that all the crap he's given her for being a loner for the past three years is blowing up in his face, would be awkward at first and painful later. Besides, his mind can't get around the fact that she is his best friend; the one who before her trip was cautious and used to hiding everything from everyone. He realizes that now she is different, but he can't hazard a guess about the cause of it, unless it's Cory.

The boyfriend.

It's not that he misses the old Sara, who was sometimes short with him and always tinged with sadness around the eyes. He much prefers this new Sara who is supremely rational and cautiously optimistic about everything.

If it weren't for the boyfriend, he'd be lapping up the attention she casts his way like it was spring water. Instead his heart is fickle; one day he can barely get enough of her. The next he's chock full of reasons why he must go straight home after breakfast; why he can't go to movies, or shopping, or to the park.

Looking down at the beginnings of a gut, he thinks he should start skipping breakfast, too.

She seems to suspect he's lying about his sudden plans, but she does not call him on it.

On the days when he avoids her, he holes himself up in his home, watches TV or plays video games, in self-imposed exile. Sulking.

Deep down he knows what the problem is, but he's too embarrassed to admit it. He's jealous.

Not of the boyfriend, really. It's more like he's jealous of the fact that she has someone now. She was the one he could always count on being more miserable than himself.

One morning after shift, the two of them head out to the parking lot together to go to the diner for breakfast. Like usual, she is touching his arm while regaling him with a story he's heard before, that he finds neither amusing nor particularly compelling. Okay, perhaps it was funny the first time, but he's pretty sure he's heard this one at least three times. He is tired of playing interested and is about ready to tell her that he'd rather go straight home this morning, when the relative silence of the morning is cut by a gleeful squeal.

She's squealing.

He follows her happy eyes to the form of a man leaning casually against a rusty Dodge Neon, his arms crossed, his eyes hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

She drops Nick's arm like a hot potato and launches herself across the parking lot at the mysterious Neon driver, and Nick feels the familiar tug at his tummy.

He assumes this is the boyfriend. 'That's Officer Boyfriend to you, sonny,' his brain retorts, and he tries to escape, staying out of sight and edging along the parking lot in the direction of his Tahoe. But he doesn't move fast enough for the cat-like quickness of Sara Sidle, and she is calling him back to meet Officer Boyfriend, who presumably drove down just to surprise her.

It's so damned cute that it nauseates him.

He rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses and ambles over to play the third fiddle to their romantic hodown.

It's an all time high in the history of discomfort, he thinks.

"Cory," she says in a sweet sing-song voice, "this is Nicky," she says.

"Nicky," Cory shakes his hand in a man's man sort of way; not quite hard enough to break any bones, but hard enough to assert one's tough guy image.

"It's sure nice to meet you," Nick tells him, and feels a bit like Gomer Pyle next to this pale Northerner with his clipped speech and wide O's.

The discomfort floats in the air between the two men. Sara just grins broadly.

It's not until the three of them are seated around a table at the diner that Officer Boyfriend removes his sunglasses to peruse the menu. Sara is snuggled in the booth alongside him, and Nick couldn't feel more miserable and uncomfortable if he tried. To amuse himself, he flirts with the waitress and shoots suggestive glances across the diner to a middle-aged woman with curlers in her hair.

Sara stares at him like she's never seen him before.

He begs off as soon as he's finished with his pancakes. "I need to get home. I'm expecting company," he says, and Sara is still staring at him like he's a stranger. She knows there's no company, but Cory doesn't, and he stands and extends his pale hand to him. "It was great to meet you, Nicky," he says. "Thanks for all you do for Sara," he says, like she is his child, and on any other day Nick imagines Sara choking him.

But she shifts her concerned eyes from Nick to Cory, and they soften around the edges. She's got it bad for a man who believes she's not capable of being self-sufficient, and Nick is suddenly struck by how hilarious it all is.

Dark humor seems to be the only kind that amuses him, these days.

He goes home, then, and watches TV for a while - flipping channels with breakneck speed - before shutting it off. He paces through the kitchen to the dining room and then the living room a few times before going to take a cold, lonely shower and tumbling into his lonely bed.

Lonely.