Sidle On Down To Sara's Place Chapter 13: Bennie, a csi fanfic

A/N: I hold no rights to the song "Home" by the Dixie Chicks or any other of the songs that appear in this chapter...enjoy muchly...

After the ceremony, there was a short cocktail hour before everyone was led beneath the immense white tent to start dinner and dancing. All the decorations were up as opposed to last night when it was all bare. The tables were adorned with tablecloths in Polexia and Wiley's wedding colors: pink, white and a soft, mossy green. Bunches of pink carnations and baby's breath in ceramic pots with Wiley and Polly written in calligraphy served as centerpieces, along with floating candles shaped like lotus flowers bobbing up and down in little glass bowls of water. Icicle lights lined the inside of the tent. The young DJ was playing great music and a few electric disco balls on his table created splashes of light every so often. Behind his booth was a large neon sign that said Congratulations Polly & Wiley!

As Sara was about to get up from her seat at her assigned table with all the other maids to return to the bar for another Jack Rose, her fifth, she heard that voice again.

"Sara Sidle, I've never pictured you as one for wearing pink."

Sara turned in her chair to see Grissom behind her and she grimaced slightly at his comment, "I look like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol." There. She'd said it aloud.

Grissom smiled slightly. "If it's any consolation, I'm miserable in a tux. And pink brings color to your cheeks. Would you like a drink?"

"Oh...no thanks," Sara shook her head. She didn't want to tell Grissom she'd had four already. She sighed and watched Wiley and Polexia dance their first dance to the song they had chosen: "I Got You Babe." How very like her brother, Sara thought. "God, Wiley is such a ladies' man. I can't believe this is his fourth wedding."

"Did you attend the last three?"

"Oh, no. The only reason I'm here is because my brother asked me to personally. Otherwise I wouldn't be caught dead."

Grissom chuckled a bit.

"It's nice, though, that he finally gets to experience a huge affair like this. His last three were pretty small, from what I understand. Cecilia's thrilled," Sara nodded towards Cecilia, who, in her fabulous aqua dress, was encircled by four men much younger than she—at least twenty years her junior—laughing with her head thrown back and a Cosmopolitan in one hand. "Polly's parents look thrilled, too, don't you think?"

Grissom swiveled his head towards the bride's parents. Georgia and Lemuel sat stone-faced and dazed, each one clutching an alcoholic beverage and looking quite miserable. "Positively elated."

Sara laughed. "They can't believe they're paying for this thing. Polly's first marriage is Wiley's fourth."

Grissom shrugged and put his drink on the table. He stood up and held out a hand. "Come on. You look like you need to dance."

Sara gave him a look that could have killed a cow, "I need to dance? Grissom, do you even know how to dance?"

"Let's go, Sara," Grissom pulled her from her chair and took her onto the dance floor, where a soft country song was beginning to play. There were a four more couples on the dance floor now, including Wiley and Polexia.

"I mistook the warnings for wisdom...from so called friends quick to advise. Though your touch was telling me otherwise. Somehow I saw you as a weakness..."

Grissom put one hand on the small of Sara's bare back, and took one of her hands in his free one. Sara was at a loss. She'd never danced like this before.

"Your other hand goes here," Grissom gently put Sara's hand on his shoulder.

"I thought I had to be strong...oh, but I was just young, I was scared, I was wrong."

"Follow my lead, kid," Grissom winked.

Sara, careful not to trod on Grissom's toes, lost herself in the music. She let Grissom lead and was butter in his arms. She hadn't felt like this...since forever.

"Not a night goes by I don't dream of wandering through the home that might have been. I listened to my pride when my heart cried out for you. Now every day I wake again in a house that might have been...a home..."

Her heart was pounding and she felt like she was floating. Was it because she was dancing with Grissom, his arms around her and her ear to his chest, listening to his heart beating? Or was it the mass amount of alcohol she had ingested being absorbed through her body?

"Guess I did what I did believe in. That love is a dangerous thing, Oh but that couldn't hurt anymore than never knowing…"

Sara tried to remember the last time she'd slow-danced like this. Probably in middle school, in eighth grade during one of those Teen Canteens that were held four times a year at her school. But this was definitely different. She was still wearing a lame dress, but in terms of the man whose arms she was in? Yeah, this was not eighth grade.

He wasn't a bad dancer. Sara wondered when the last time Grissom danced with a woman like this? This close, this intimate?

"Four walls, a roof, a door, some windows: just a place to run when my working day is through. They say home is where the heart is. If there's an exception to the rule, I guess that's true..."

Who taught him to dance? His mother was an option. From what Sara had heard, she sounded like a woman who would want her son to know how to dance like a gentleman.

The song ended and the tempo picked up on the next one, and Sara felt her euphoria slipping away. She didn't want to let go but Grissom was loosening his hold and led her off the dance floor.

"Why Mista Grissom, I must say, you do dance divinely," Sara put on a smile and a false Southern accent.

Grissom laughed. "You sound like your eldest niece. Elizabeth, is it?"

"Yeah. Libby, we call her."

They spotted her dancing in her pink junior bridesmaid dress to "Suga Suga How You Get So Fly" with one of the waiters. She was laughing loudly, her head thrown back and trying to balance the circlet of carnations in her hair.

"She's got her aunt's looks."

Sara blushed and gave another glance at Elizabeth. Well, they did have the same narrow nose and arched eyebrows, but Sara didn't really see so many similarities between them. After all, Sara got the majority of her looks from her mother Eavan.

The mellow R&B song soon ended and then the yard was suddenly filled with pulse-pounding rap music.

"Ghetto superstar, that is what you are! Comin' from afar! Reachin' for the stars! Run away with me! To another place! We can rely on each other, uh-huh! From one corner to another, uh-huh!" blared the music. Sara saw Grissom wince and immediately know that this was not his type of music.

"Want to get out of here?" shouted Sara.

"Lead the way!" Grissom replied, plugging his fingers in his ears.

"I really do hate weddings," Sara yawned. She examined carefully the swan pattern etched onto her drinking glass, half full with a cocktail called a White Dove that tasted vaguely of vanilla ice cream. They were sitting on the front gallery in the porch swing, far from the party, beneath the yellow glow of the overhead lights. The DJ's music could still be heard, but not as loudly.

"Mmm," was all that came from Grissom, and the tinkling of ice as he swirled his scotch and soda.

"I mean, you spend all this money on fancy crap and for what? It's only one night. You're never going to wear that twenty thousand dollar dress ever again. Six hundred dollar flowers will wilt and die in a matter of days. Food and cake are eaten within minutes without a second thought. It's just very stupid how much emphasis is put on weddings."

"Interesting insight."

"You never struck me as a wedding person either, Gris."

"I'm not, really. I mean, I was almost married once…"

Sara nearly dropped her drink. "What?"

"Ah, I should have kept my mouth shut." Grissom swallowed his last sip of scotch.

"No, no, no, no, no. Start talking now, mister."

Grissom sighed. "It was just this girl, this girl Bennett Kolakowski, that I met at UCLA. We were in the same literature and psychology class."

"Bennett Kolakowski," Sara repeated the girl's moniker, liking the ethnic flair of the softly masculine first name paired with a tongue-twisting, Slovakian sounding surname. It was a lot more interesting than Sara Sidle.

"Yeah. Wavy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, majoring in education. Anyway, Bennie and I were going for, I don't know, a year or so, when she told me she was going to be studying abroad in Greece for her junior year and wouldn't be back until September. I couldn't believe my ears. So, in the heat of the moment and feeling like the world would cave in if Bennie left, I blurted a marriage proposal right there in the flatbed of my pickup over a basket of nachos from the Dairy Queen."

"You can get nachos at Dairy Queen?" Sara grimaced.

"I don't recommend it. Anyway, Bennie was stunned. It wasn't the marriage proposal she had been dreaming of, I can tell you that. I didn't have a ring, didn't get down on one knee, but she accepted. We planned the whole wedding in that following week, right down to the color of her shoes, and five days later Bennie got on a plane and headed for Athens.

"We kept in touch, I wrote her daily and she did the same."

"How romantic," Sara said.

"Bennie was in Greece for five months before I received a letter that changed everything."

"Uh-oh." Sara sounded like a kindergartener who just found out that the bears had come home while Goldilocks was sleeping. "What happened with Bennie's letter?"

"Well, once I surpassed the 'how are you' and the 'wish you were here' that appeared in all of her letters, the next paragraph began with, 'this isn't easy for me to say'," Grissom sighed. "I read that letter so many times, I committed it to memory."

"Tell, tell," Sara pressed.

Grissom narrowed his eyes and recited, "'This isn't easy for me to say, Gil, but I'm afraid we must cancel our wedding plans. We've been apart for so long and I should have seen it coming. I've fallen hopelessly in love with a wonderful Greek man. He is a poet and we have been spending an awful lot of time together. So much time, that I realized I am no longer interested in spending my life with you. We eloped last weekend.'"

"That's it?" Sara exclaimed. "What a shitty way to say I don't love you anymore. And here you were, devoted the entire time—"

"Uh, well, not the entire time."

"No! You fooled around on Bennie?" Sara grinned slyly.

"Let's just say I wasn't that disappointed she broke the engagement."

Sara laughed loudly, a real laugh. A laugh Grissom hadn't heard from her in years.