How Do You Sleep?
TEASER: Grissom takes a risk. Sequel to "Birthday Suits".
DISCLAIMER: Last time I checked, the evidence was stacked against me in my claim to own even a single stock option in the many partners who make up the CSI franchise. If I did, there would be a few things different on the show – but then what fun would it be to write fanfic for us GS/WC shippers?
RATING: R for sexual content
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The muse just wouldn't let me go after one of my reviewers suggested that I keep going with "Birthday Suits". This isn't in quite the same vein, but will hopefully amuse and delight anyway.
- - - - -
Gil Grissom leaned back in his desk chair and stretched his arms up over his head. It had been a long week since Conrad Ecklie split up the night shift and made Catherine the swing shift supervisor – so long, in fact, that he and Sara both had used up all their available monthly overtime in that one week. Gil had just submitted the timesheets and expected the backlash at any moment.
Conrad didn't disappoint. The thought had barely entered Gil's head that Conrad should be making an appearance when he did, in fact, appear at the door, steam rising off his balding head. Or so Gil imagined, which made him smile.
"I wouldn't be smiling if I were you, Dr. Grissom," the assistant lab director said, a grimace making his non-descript face look peevish. "You have a lot of explaining to do." He waved a sheaf of paper at Gil and took the three steps necessary to stand right against the pin-neat desk.
Gil sat forward and leaned his elbows on his desk, not wanting to give in to the anger he felt building inside at the implicit accusation. "What exactly would you like me to explain, Mr. Ecklie?" He knew it was petty to emphasize the AD's lack of credentials, but it felt good.
Conrad's scowl deepened. "Eighty hours of overtime in one week? For you and for Sidle? Sixty for Curtis and Sanders? Did you all just take your own sweet time?"
"Conrad, sit down before you stroke out in my office."
Surprisingly, he did, with a thump that reverberated off the glass walls.
Gil steepled his hands and took a deep breath. "Did you check our solve rate?"
Conrad shrank back in the chair. "Not yet. I assume it's comparable to the other shifts' rates."
"It's better than yours ever was, but then, that's always been the case, hasn't it?" Before Conrad could respond, he went on. "One hundred percent, Conrad. And three cold cases that were related to two cases this week. That's a total of 25 in seven days with three CSI's and one dedicated lab tech. If we were properly staffed, with five CSI's plus a lab tech and access to others as available, I doubt that there would have been more than ten hours of overtime for any of us."
Gil watched as several emotions crossed his supervisor's face, only one of them pleasant. But that one came back in the end, which allowed Gil to relax his spine a fraction.
"So, how come you and Sidle had eighty hours rather than you and Curtis? Sofia is the senior of the two."
Gil didn't rise to the bait; the inference that he had shown Sara preference was old hat at this point. "Ms. Curtis chose to save some of her overtime for another week. She can then serve as lead CSI should there be a complication with a case later in the month." That happened to have been her exact reasoning when she asked him about the workload. "Greg's services were not needed after his sixty hours, but for the record, he was more than willing to work anytime we might have needed him."
"I see." Conrad huffed for a moment, apparently trying to make a decision. "You and Sidle take three days starting today. You've earned it. Curtis was off last night?"
"Yes. And tonight."
"I'll ask Catherine to move her staff to cover the holes tonight. Damn you, Grissom, why do you have to be so good?"
Grissom smiled. "Just to make your life difficult."
Conrad glared at him, but reached for a pen from the holder on Gil's desk and signed each offending timesheet with his inimitable scrawl. Pointing the pen at Gil, he warned, "Don't think this changes things."
"I wouldn't expect it to." That would be far too much to hope for.
Sara stopped in the doorway and pointed at Conrad, asking a question with her stance. Gil waved her inside, wanting to tell her about their unexpected time off himself. He was still hoping to salvage his friendship with her, although anything more was beyond desire and hope. The risks were just too great.
She stepped into the office at the same time Ecklie stepped away from the desk and turned around, bringing the two face to face. Gil bit back a laugh at the expression on Sara's face and wondered if a similar disdain showed on the lab director's visage.
"Ms. Sidle."
"Mr. Ecklie."
They stood looking at each other for a moment before Conrad shrugged and sidestepped around her and out of Gil's office.
"What was that all about?" She motioned behind her and made a face.
This time, Gil did laugh. "He still doesn't like me very much." He waved her into the chair Conrad had vacated.
"Solve rate or overtime?"
"Both."
"Of course. 'Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.'"
Gil blinked at her. He thought for a moment, but couldn't place the quote. "Cite your source."
Sara gave him a now-rare full-fledged grin, showing the gap in her teeth that he loved so much because it was hers. "Fulton J. Sheen."
"Impressive." He smiled back at her.
"So, what did mediocrity have to say to genius this morning?"
A laugh escaped from deep within, a belly laugh like he hadn't experienced since the day weeks ago when Warrick and Catherine tripped Nick up with semantics and Greg blasted R. Kelly's "Naked" at just the right moment.
The better part was that Sara joined him. Her skin flushed pink as she giggled, giving her a glow that he hadn't seen in at least a year. He felt his pulse rate go up as she doubled over, still laughing in her sweet, bubbly way. His own laughter sounded rough and out of place in concert with hers, but he couldn't stop as long as she was in hysterics.
It had to be the lack of sleep. It had to be the stress of the team breaking up, getting used to a new person, missing friends and colleagues, battling accusations and implications. It had to be those things, because if it wasn't, it was the fact that Sara Sidle was the person with whom he felt most comfortable in the whole world, even now, and that he just couldn't allow. Not before, not now. Not ever.
"We got three days off, Sara," he managed to say between wheezing guffaws a few minutes later. "Mediocrity's way of saying 'thanks' to genius."
She stopped laughing and looked at him through eyes dripping with tears. "Three days? What the hell am I going to do with three days off?"
"Sleep?" he suggested off the top of his head. It headed his list.
When she didn't respond, he looked away from Sara and gave himself a mental dope slap. How do you sleep, Sara? Not well and not much. Sara the insomniac would hardly look forward to three days of trying to sleep.
"Okay, well, maybe not. How about we start with breakfast and go from there?" He didn't realize he was going to ask her out until the words escaped his lips; he wished he could reel them back even faster than they tumbled out. He knew she would be glaring death at him for breeching their unspoken line of truce.
Then he looked at her and saw her lips forming a perfect "O" of surprise, her eyes wide and bright. "I would like that," she said with a nod. "I would like that a lot."
He gave her what he hoped was a gentle, genuine smile. "Okay. The usual?"
She tilted her head and gazed at him for a few seconds, some hidden thought traversing her mind that swept a small grin across her beautiful lips. "No. There's a new place out near my apartment that I've wanted to try for a while. Why don't you meet me at my place and we can go together?"
His heart, which had slowed back to its normal pace, sped up again. This was new, and big, and scary. Grissom stared his "not before, not now, not ever" philosophy in the face, realizing that this time the responsibility belonged to him for starting this dialogue. If he ended it here, he had no doubt that Sara's resignation would be on his desk the next time he came to the office, along with her cell phone, her pager, and the keys to her county-issued Tahoe.
All or nothing.
Nothing was something he couldn't possibly imagine. All was more than he had ever allowed himself to think, although his dreams had been filled with all since he met her at Harvard 10 years ago.
"Give me an hour to shower and change?"
"Absolutely. You think I want to eat breakfast with a man who smells like a five-day old corpse?"
"If you were any other woman, I'd have to ask how you know what that smells like," he retorted.
Sara pushed herself out of the chair and leaned over the desk to put her lips millimeters from hers. "If I were any other woman, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
Since there was more truth to that statement than she could possibly know, he just smiled at her as she walked away from him, admiring her swaying hips.
"An hour, Gris," she reminded him without turning around. "Don't be late."
- - - - -
He wasn't. He didn't think he'd ever gotten home, showered, shaved, dressed, and back out the door any faster in his life. He arrived in Sara's parking lot 47 minutes later – after a 10 minute drive from his office to his townhouse and a 20 minute drive from his place to hers. He debated ringing her bell early, just to see if she would let him in while she was getting ready.
Before he could get out of his truck, her door opened and she stepped out onto her front stoop. She stood in a sunbeam as a gust of wind caught her fine hair and splayed it as a halo around her face. The sight snatched the breath from his body and flung it across the desert, leaving him gasping at the illumination of perfection.
How could he ever have denied himself the safe haven of her arms in a life of misery and loneliness?
When she turned toward him and made eye contact, whatever instinct he had to start breathing again retreated. Her blinding smile and open arms set his soul afire with such furor that he couldn't hear the voice in his head analyzing his high as anoxia.
"Grissom?"
He blinked, startled to find Sara clutching his left elbow through his open window.
"Are you okay? You look a bit out of it."
He wiped his other hand down his face and gave her a rueful grin. "Yeah. Just blown away by beauty."
She smiled at him and waved her hand over her head. "It is a pretty day."
"The day is nothing compared to you."
She blushed and sucked in her bottom lip.
"It's true, Sara," he whispered, reaching out as best he could with the arm she still held to cup her cheek in his palm.
She shook her head but placed her hand over his on her face. "It's not this easy, Gris."
He nodded. "It doesn't have to be as difficult as I've made it all these years."
She didn't answer, but the tears he felt against his hand told him everything he needed to know.
He chose his words with care, thinking back to a day he really preferred to forget, the day the DNA Lab blew up. "Get in, honey."
He let her disentangle herself from him and waited until she buckled the seatbelt before he started the truck. "Where to, Sara?"
She smiled a little and pointed across her body. "Go left out of the lot and take a right at the light. It's on the corner on the left at the fourth light."
"Your wish is my command." God, he sounded like a cliché.
She rolled her eyes at him and sat in silence for almost the entire ride. As he approached the fourth light, she nodded toward his window. "This is it, Gris. The entrance to the lot is off the cross street."
From the outside, it didn't look like a place his Sara would choose. He would have expected flashy or retro urban, but the restaurant that proclaimed itself "Strawberry Banks" looked like a quaint bed and breakfast he had once stayed in on a trip to Montreal. He didn't think there was anything else like it in Las Vegas.
Then it hit him: this must have looked like home to her, like the B&B her parents ran in Tamales Bay. He grinned at her when he shut the truck off. "Homesick?"
"No." She shook her head for emphasis. "Just curious. My neighbor says he had the best Belgian waffles of his life here, and his wife swears by the French toast."
"All we need now is English muffins, German apple pancakes, and Turkish coffee and we'll have all of NATO for breakfast."
He knew his joke wasn't as funny as her reaction made it out to be, but he still enjoyed the fact that she laughed at it. "Shall we?"
Settling in a booth in the back corner of the busy restaurant, the two sat across from each other, each studying the menu as though it were evidence in a murder case. They didn't say anything to each other until their waitress had taken their orders, hers for the waffles and his, to his amusement, for authentic German apple pancakes.
"You could have gotten sausage or bacon if you wanted, Gris," she said, reopening the conversation in the odd way she had of thanking people for respecting her dietary habits.
"I could have, but I'm with you and I . . ." Dare he say what he really wanted?
"You what?"
"I'd really like to spend the day with you, at least until one of us can't stay awake any longer."
She rewarded him with another surprised "O", which morphed into a grin the likes of which he had only seen on her face in his most vivid dreams: that of a woman on the prowl for her man. "Why does it have to end there?"
He was glad he hadn't yet picked up his coffee or he might have spilled it down his shirt and trousers. As it was, his hands shook when he brought them together in front of him on the table, but her touch as her hands enveloped his stilled the quaking in his limbs, if not the pounding of his heart. All or nothing.
He took a deep breath and plunged from the 10 meter platform into the deepest water he had ever known, praying for a clean dive rather than a killing belly flop. "It doesn't." He wasn't exactly sure what he had just committed himself to, but he was willing to risk anything from just holding her in his arms while he slept to, well, not sleeping with her, the thought of which brought a smile to his face.
"What's that smile for?" Sara ran her magically bare foot up his leg under his trousers. He hadn't noticed that her shoes were slip-ons.
He swallowed hard and took another deep breath, glad that her foot could only go so far inside his pants leg and that the table hid the evidence of his arousal. "Where that might lead," he answered, deciding that it was time to stop playing games and get serious about seduction, if that's what she wanted.
Sara picked up his hands and laid a kiss in each palm. "This is it, Gris. If this happens now, it's forever or it's never again."
It wasn't just seduction for her, either. Had he never before realized how deep her feelings ran for him? "I know."
They lapsed into serene meditation as she pulled her hands away, folding them in front of her. She looked lost, her mind a million miles away while her body remained with him, heart and lungs working just as the autonomic system should.
He wondered if she was working on the same thing he was – would this be forever or never again? He doubted he could live through it if it were never again; he felt his addiction to her growing by the second and he was sure that there would be no cure for the Sara Sidle habit. There had never been before, and that was without any real acknowledgement of their desire. The only word he could use was "fear", but it wasn't so much being afraid as being in awe that he would never be sated once he had a taste, a feel, an experience of the woman in whose hands his heart had rested for so long. All or nothing.
"I love you, Sara," he blurted into the silence.
Her head snapped up, her eyes narrowed with suspicion, as though she wasn't quite sure she'd heard him correctly.
He cut off any question she could ask by taking her hands in his this time. He looked at their intertwined fingers, hers delicate and seemingly fragile, his blunted and powerful. He could crush her hands if he wanted to, as easily as he could crush her heart. He had the distinct feeling she could return the favor, however, as she was trained in unarmed combat. That she could destroy his heart was a foregone conclusion.
She wouldn't meet his gaze. He lifted one hand to her chin, keeping hold of her hands with his other, and turned her head toward him. He had to make her understand. "I love you, Sara Sidle. I have since the day I met you. I have been every kind of fool for trying to deny it all these years, and I don't have a single valid excuse for the misery I've put us both through."
He saw the tears well in her eyes and fought to keep his voice steady as he did the unthinkable and poured his heart out to her. "I have loved you when I flirted with other women. I've loved you when you were with other men. I've loved you despite my own stupidity and yours. Hell, I've even loved you when you've had purple yogurt snot dripping from your nose and been raving like a lunatic for Nick and Warrick to 'geg me nafkim!'"
She laughed at his reminder of a happy day in the life of the lab, not so long ago when things were on track and as normal as anything ever got on night shift. He wondered for a nanosecond if Warrick and Nick knew he had witnessed the whole scene, right from the moment Warrick threw the newspaper across the room. Then he focused again on the beautiful woman before him.
"Sara, this can't be a never again. I will die if it isn't forever."
Their food arrived at just the wrong moment. He had to have her response, but Sara turned her attention to her waffle and ate with mechanical precision, almost robotic in her motions, until only two pieces remained on her plate.
His stomach growled, reminding him that he did need to eat, even if he wouldn't taste the food. He speared a piece of his pancake and had it to his lips when she stopped in mid-motion.
"I will, too." The raw desire in her eyes sent a bolt of excitement through him that left him breathless for the second time in half an hour.
If food could be a Technicolor multisensory experience, this meal was just that – an explosion of tastes and textures unlike anything he had ever eaten. Everything in his environment looked crisper, felt more defined in the aftermath of those three words from Sara.
He wasn't sure how they managed to make it all the way into her apartment without giving in to their hunger for each other. He had barely closed the door behind him when she stopped five feet in front of him and whirled around to face him.
"I love you, Gilbert Grissom. I have since the day I met you. I couldn't stop loving you any more than I could stop breathing. I have loved you when I watched you make a fool of yourself with other women, I have tried to wash my love for you away with other men, I have loved you when you were so wrapped up in your bugs that you couldn't even hold a conversation." She took a step toward him. "This can't be a nev –"
He closed the distance and swept her into his arms, capturing her still speaking lips in a scorching kiss that burned the oxygen out of his lungs. He held her head with his right hand, angling for deeper entry into the welcoming recesses of her hungry mouth. He slid his left hand under her tank top, searching for her bra only to find that she wasn't wearing one. His moan of excitement shuddered through them.
She broke their kiss long enough to say, "Bedroom, second door on the left." Then she attacked his mouth with a passion unequaled even in his dreams, sucking his tongue into her mouth and swirling hers along the roof of his mouth. She wrapped her legs around his waist, brushing against his hardened member. He moaned again and felt her smile against his lips.
He carried her into her bedroom and sat her down on the unmade bed. The warm scent of her in the room heightened his arousal. He let go of her head and slipped his other hand under her shirt, finding her nipples erect and responsive to the ministrations of his thumbs.
He watched her face, fascinated by the expressions of pleasure painted on it as he changed his techniques. Never before had he been interested in such a canvas, but now it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be watching as the woman he loved moved closer toward blissful completion.
He moved his right hand down her torso, stopping to caress her stomach before he deftly unbuttoned her jeans with one hand and slid the zipper down. The bikini panties revealed underneath glowed fuchsia against her pale skin. The sight drove him to see more. He used both hands to yank her jeans off, followed by her panties as she shed her top, and suddenly Sara lay nude and glorious before him as she had in his dreams for 10 years.
He couldn't help the sob that rose in his throat as he cradled her against him. He didn't deserve this ravishing creature who so willingly gave herself to him after all the callousness and indifference he had heaped upon her for years, yet here she was, vulnerable and loving and perfect.
"Gil?"
He so rarely heard her use his given name that he almost ignored her plea. "Sara?"
"Make love to me."
It was neither a command nor a demand, but an invitation, a summons to the court of life where he would finally find peace for his tortured soul. He let her go with a kiss and a gestured command to stay where she was, then stood and stripped for her.
Her admiring gaze made him flush with embarrassed pride as she took in the softened planes of his middle-aged body. He worked out, but not enough to keep the hard flesh he had owned when they first met. It didn't seem to matter to her; she reached out for him and stood to take him in her arms, flesh to flesh for the first time.
For all the hunger of the first few minutes, their lovemaking took the whole morning as they explored each other with the practiced ease of investigators, lending a familiarity to their actions that could only be explained by his dreams: The dream of her hands stroking him to teeth gnashing ecstasy before she lowered herself onto him, controlling his orgasm with precision until she clenched around him. The dream of him tasting her as he explored her depths with his fingers, bringing a raw scream of unbridled passion from her throat as she writhed under his touch. The dream of them crashing together, eyes open with trust and ardor and love in their gaze while their bodies wrung every ounce of pleasure from each other.
When they lay satisfied at last, soaked and musky and completed, he nuzzled her hair as he snugged her into his shoulder. "Sara, how do you sleep?"
He felt her smile against his skin as she answered in a sleepy voice. "With you, Gil, very well and very much."
-- FIN --