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. Therefore, I plead guilty to the charge of having fun with the crew and promise to have them back in time for the next night shift to start.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The only resemblance between the person Grissom never expects to see in Las Vegas and me is the first name. Honest. It's the only way the jokes work. Well, okay, if you insist, I'll tell you that we share a title, but not the one at the butt of the jokes. And if there were any other similarities, there wouldn't be a story because, well, I'm just not Grissom's type! More's the pity . . .

- - - - -

Seven eventful weeks of Grissom's unfulfilled life passed. Warrick celebrated his birthday for over a month, ending with a very belated surprise party at Sara's. Conrad Ecklie became the Assistant Director of the Las Vegas Crime Lab. Nightshift got saddled with some new faces and Catherine became the swing shift supervisor, getting Nick and Warrick as part of her team.

The changes left him frustrated and irritated. He had recognized the signs of burnout in himself long before he had seen them in Sara, so applying his own advice to himself for a change, he took three consecutive days off. He had contemplated going away for a longer time to use some of his accumulated vacation time, but he didn't trust Ecklie to take such a request well during his first few weeks as head of the lab. Or ever, frankly, but that was a problem for another day.

Sitting at breakfast in his favorite restaurant at the Mirage on his first morning of the long "weekend", Grissom acknowledged to himself that the painful break up of his team still gnawed at him, not because Catherine didn't deserve the promotion but because Ecklie didn't. If Grissom had been in charge of the decision, Catherine would have gotten the AD position, Ecklie would have lost his job, the swing shift supervisor would have gotten Conrad's job, and Sara would have gotten the swing shift job.

Such an arrangement would have eliminated one of the two biggest obstacles to the furtherance of his relationship with Sara – and he was daily realizing that age was not as big an obstacle as he had always thought. That wasn't the way the world worked, of course, so he was left with a reality he hadn't yet conquered.

What plagued him recently was what Sara wasn't joking about, all the more so after Catherine tried in her not-so-subtle way to prod him into action at Warrick's birthday party. He still wasn't sure that his hope, that she wanted him to play in the land of the living with her, was what she really meant that morning before breakfast. He found himself in the same position he had occupied since he foolishly asked her to join his team more than four years ago: alone and terrified to make a move that might throw the axis of his world out of balance.

A silvery voice interrupted his bitter reverie with a southern accented, "Good morning."

He looked up, expecting to find the source of the voice speaking to him, but the only other patrons in the restaurant this early sat around a table a few feet away, obviously introducing themselves as handshakes passed across and around the circle. The voice could only belong to the curvaceous woman with the long cinnamon copper hair who sat with her back to him. His heart rate spiked when she spoke again.

"I'm Reverend Doctor Fitzhenry. You've probably read my bio since I'm the keynoter." She turned her head and Grissom saw her smile in profile, one with a lack of ego that not many people could achieve. "I go by Hank."

Someone else at the table asked the same question he had first overheard, then experienced a dozen times in her company, two years ago in Arizona. "Hank? What's your real name?"

She turned away from him to answer, but he wished he could see her expression again, and wondered if it had changed in the interval. "Um, Ruth."

The longest it had ever taken anyone to make the inevitable joke two years ago had been ten seconds. This time, it was three and two people made it at once with high, squeaking German-accented voices. "Dr. Ruth, Dr. Ruth!"

He chuckled at Hank's fallen shoulders. "And that would be why, given my profession, I go by Hank."

"What, you don't think it's funny that a minister named Dr. Ruth is also a sex therapist?"

He'd heard that observation thirteen times, too.

"I don't, but I'd like to think God is amused."

Grissom listened to the interaction for a while, an auditory voyeur unable to tear himself away from the form and voice of a woman with whom he by rights should have fallen head over heels in love. He wondered if he could leave without being seen, but then couldn't bring himself to signal for his check before the group at the other table began to rifle through pockets and purses for their preferred methods of payment.

A second before it happened, he knew Hank would turn around. He sat, frozen, as she recognized him, expecting some move on her part to include him in the final few moments of her group's breakfast. She spared him that, but her golden-green eyes pinned him to his chair as effectively as he had ever affixed a butterfly to a mat, so even if he had wanted to leave before she came over, he couldn't.

Her table emptied and long before he was prepared for the force that was Hank Fitzhenry, she settled with easy grace on the bench across from him.

She leaned forward, elbows on the table, and reached for his hands, removing them from the cup of lukewarm coffee he had been gripping without realizing it. "You're still in love with her and you still haven't done a damned thing about it."

He looked up from the abandoned mug with what he hoped was a disarming smile. "Hello to you, too. Are you sure you're really a minister?"

"Not about me, Gil Grissom. About you and Sara, who doesn't have a clue how fortunate she is that you love her to the depth of the Marianas Trench." He read something in her expression that might have been pity, but whether for him or for Sara, he could not have said.

"Am I that obvious?" He wondered if she knew she was stroking his wrists.

Hank snorted. "Honey, I see this all the time."

He shifted at her term of endearment. "Honey" meant Sara to him; to hear someone address him like that left him discomfited. "What, supervisors in love with subordinates?"

"That, too." She looked at him, expecting him to figure it out. He had seen that look a lot during the time they spent together before. Hank was the only person other than Sara who had ever challenged him to use his intellect in self-reflection.

He closed his eyes and tried to think like his interlocutor. After a moment, he opened his eyes and smiled at her. "Middle aged men who are so content in their misery that they're afraid to go after what would make them happy?" He struggled not to show a physical reaction to the thought of Dr. Lurie that crossed his mind just then.

She nodded. "Never said you were stupid. Just slow." Any insult he might have felt washed away with her bright grin. "I presume, at the very least, that Ms. Sidle is still single and still working for you."

He nodded. "We have had our . . . issues . . . of late, but yes, to both."

"You came clean to Catherine, right?"

How she could remember the details of his life and his quest for Sara so easily, Gil couldn't begin to understand. He surmised, however, that her memory for people's life stories might be similar to his ability to memorize thousands of species of insects and just as many random quotations. He knew it said something not all together flattering about him as a person that bugs and words were more important than people.

"Yes. She had guessed most of it. When she asked me what prompted me to tell her, I conveniently left you out, though. I'm not sure I could explain you to anyone else."

"Can you explain me to yourself?"

Well, no, not really. Not a man to seek out sex for the sake of sex, and certainly not a man to open up to anyone he knew, let alone to total strangers, for one weekend two years ago he had done both to a greater extent than at any other point in his life. Perhaps the inexplicability of his immediate connection to Hank was one part of his sentimentalism with regard to the cross he kept tucked in his desk drawer.

She chuckled. "Yeah, didn't think so."

She still held his hands and caressed his wrists with gentle pressure. He wasn't sure if she was comforting him or seducing him.

"Why are you here?" It somehow didn't feel appropriate for him to admit that he had been eavesdropping earlier.

If she knew, which he suspected she did, she gave no indication. "A conference. I'm the keynote speaker for the Association of Professional Marriage and Family Counselors."

"Ah." If her intent was to seduce him, her subtle ministrations on his arms were working. He shifted in his seat to get more comfortable. "How long are you here?" His voice came out with a more expectant tone than he anticipated, as though his body were betraying him organ by organ.

"Through the weekend. I decided to take a little vacation time, too."

"So today's Tuesday . . ." He couldn't believe where his mind was going. But his mouth followed without check. "I don't work again until Friday night. I could, um . . . take another night off if you would be willing to suffer my company that long."

She raised her left eyebrow at him and quirked a grin. "When is Sara's next night off?"

"What does Sara have to do with this?" A voice in his head screamed everything, but another voice, very masculine and needy, blared over it: nothing!

"Everything," Hank said in what he hoped was unknowing agreement with his head. He wouldn't put it past her, however, to be reading his mind. "Look, Gil, I'm not going to lie to you and say that accepting this particular speaking engagement was coincidental to its location. I had every intention of seeking you out, quite frankly in hopes that you had been shot down by Sara and were in serious need of the arms of a good woman to provide emotional and physical comfort." She let go of his hands as if suddenly conscious of her actions. "You haven't even tried."

All he could do was look away from her penetrating stare in abject confession of his failure. His earlier admission had been easy banter. This time, it hurt.

"Gil, honey, you deserve to be happy. I don't know if Sara can make you happy, but I do know that you can't ever be happy until you've offered her the opportunity to decide for herself. If she doesn't love you like you love her, then maybe I'll stand a chance."

Now his guilt had two faces, and the one sitting across the table from him was doing for him what he didn't have the guts to do for Sara. "I thought you said it was no emotional strings attached."

"It was," she confirmed with a rueful laugh. "But you, like my two dearly departed husbands, got through the armor around my heart."

"Oh." He reached for her hands this time, hoping to comfort her somehow. "I'm sorry, Hank. I didn't know."

"Hell, Gil, I didn't know, either, until I got home. And after two years of nothing in the mail, well . . ."

"You thought you'd take a chance and see what had happened."

"Mmm." She squeezed his hands, let hers rest in his while she studied their intertwined fingers. "Here's the thing, Gil. I want you. Almost as much as you want Sara. But I'm not going to give in to my desire unless you come back here before I leave and tell me that Sara doesn't want you. I'll take you however I can get you after that for as long as you'll have me."

Grissom sat back hard without letting go of Hank's hands. He expected to be seduced, not offered a woman's heart. Lady Heather's offer had been a ruse, or so he chose to believe. This, however, was very real.

It didn't help to know that the woman who had just handed him her heart on a silver platter was both very talented and very forgiving in bed. She had given him permission to fantasize about Sara while they were . . . screwing around seemed the best description, neither as cold as fucking nor as intimate as making love . . . and between Hank's ministrations and the images of Sara in his head, well . . . a short fall rock climbing had been a good cover story for his soreness and some bruising upon his return to Las Vegas in time for Thanksgiving. Never mind that the closest he got to any rocks while he was in Scottsdale were the ones he walked past on the way to his conference and her suite.

He could take the coward's way out and just dodge Hank's calls all week. He could play the cowardly fiend and come back the next day proclaiming Sara's rejection to take advantage of what he could get as a sure thing. He could be the fiend and just take Hank now – the look on her face invited him to do so.

But she knew as well as he did that he had to be able to look himself in the mirror every morning, and the way she set up her proposition, there was only one way he would be able to do that by the end of the week: talk to Sara and come back to Hank with the results.

Hank laughed as he was about to speak but didn't look up from their joined fingers. "Someone had to push you out of your comfort zone."

"I doubt anyone else could have done so as thoroughly." He hoped he didn't sound bitter or angry.

She looked up at him then, green eyes brimming with tears. "I just want you to be happy, Gilbert Grissom. I don't think you will be with anyone but Sara. I'm willing to try to make you happy if she's not."

Her reiteration twisted his heart more. She deserved to be happy, too. Both of her husbands had died in the line of duty. The first one, a Marine helicopter pilot, got shot down by friendly fire during the Gulf War. The second one, a Naval aviator, died after he rescued four other men from a flash fire on a carrier providing air support for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, a year to the day before she found Grissom looking, "Lost, forlorn, and desperately in love with someone you think you can't have," at the hotel's poolside bar in Scottsdale.

Hank had also had at least two miscarriages, one in each marriage. As she had put it back when they first met, the more success she had professionally, the more tragedy she suffered in her personal life.

He could love Hank. If it weren't for Sara.

"If it weren't for Sara," he repeated, this time in a whisper.

"But it is. And it's for you." She untangled her fingers from his and sat back against the booth. "I won't call you. But don't leave me hanging. Please?"

That was the easiest thing she had asked of him all morning. "I won't."