"It's been a long week. Can you make it to the diner? My treat."
Grissom can't help himself, his heart skips a beat when he sees that Sidle smile. He savors it, and almost misses Greg's reply.
"You're buying? And you have to ask? We are so there."
Sara nods, still smiling. Good, she's the reason for this invitation, though he knows it wouldn't be a bad idea to take his new team for breakfast more often. They need to trust each other to succeed, and eating together promotes trust. He supposes it's a primal thing.
Of course, Greg and Sara already seem to trust each other, and he hopes they trust him. Who am I kidding? Greg trusts me. Sara trusts me. She trusts me. She hasn't been pulling away lately, it's just my imagination.
But he couldn't shake the feeling that their bond was fading. Had faded.
There was a barrier between them these days, and he knew just what it was: Sara's lover. She never mentioned him, but he could feel the change in her from fifty feet away.
For years, whenever she was near, he could feel her. He felt sure he could pinpoint her exact position in a pitch black room, as if he were a compass and she his magnetic north. Oh, poetic, Gil. Stick to Shakespeare.
The point, though, is that poetic or not, it has always been a two-way pull. Sometimes a tug of war. And that's changed, she's reduced it somehow. She can't erase it, though. It's as natural as gravity. Grissom was sure he could still find her in darkness, now and for the rest of his life, but he could no longer feel her matching pull, the mental tendrils that no science could detect but that he knew existed. That were all he allowed himself, when it came to Sara.
Well, he would have to show her the way back to him. Somehow.
Trust? You aren't trying to build team trust. If you were, you'd be looking for Sophia right now, to include her. You probably should, anyway.
As if on cue, Greg asked, "Have you invited Sophia? Because I think she's been in the evidence locker most of the night, going over the Klein evidence. It's coming up on appeal."
"I was just going to look for her. Thanks for the tip."
He managed to maneuver the seating so that Sara was beside him, with Sophia and Greg on the other side of the booth. Sara smiled at him, but she didn't react to his presence. Not the way she used to.
He was confused, waiting for the slight stiffening, the changes in her breathing he hadn't consciously noticed until they stopped.
It can't be too late.
He watched Sara as she laughed and chatted with Greg. He felt Sophia's eyes on him, and wondered at the triangle of attraction. Could Sophia feel his response? He wasn't sure. Surely whatever she felt for him was merely physical; she barely knew him.
Perhaps it was the appeal of the anti-Ecklie.
Well, she had agreed to stay, and that was all that mattered. If flirting with co-workers was something he objected to, he and Catherine would never have become friends.
Some drunken college girls stumbled in, laughing loudly as they made their way to the counter. Sara smiled indulgently in their direction and rolled her eyes. Sophia snorted a little. It was an odd moment of communication between the women. Surely it was unimportant, a meaningless exchange of glances over a trivial moment, yet somehow Grissom knew he was missing something.
Sara asked him to pass the pepper. She was friendly and polite, as she had been for weeks. She obviously wasn't trying to punish him. Was she? He searched his memory for clues, trying and failing to identify the moment she had left him.
Two of the students were leaning over the jukebox, he noticed. He didn't recognize the song that began to play, but it was obvious that Sophia did. She bobbed her head to the beat, and glanced at Sara again.
"I love this song," she said.
"Really? Me too." Sara smiled, a real smile, and Grissom wondered how many of her smiles had been false, recently.
The song continued as the team dug into their meal. Grissom listened to the lyrics. I will not be afraid of women? What is this?
Oddly tentative, Sophia looked at Sara. Sara met her eye for a moment, and Grissom, sitting beside her, felt her muscles relax as she gave a barely perceptible nod. The women looked away, then, and Sophia asked Greg about a DNA anomaly in her latest case. Again, Grissom knew he had missed something, a quiet but important shift.
Greg explained the intricacies of DNA cross-contamination cheerfully, in voluminous detail, as Sara and Sophia ate their pancakes.
Grissom leaned back and watched his team, feeling utterly, unreasonably alone.
A/N: The song on the jukebox is "Cool as I Am" by Dar Williams. This is not a songfic. There will not be a song in every chapter. I don't like Sophia much, but I thought it would be nice to show Sara bonding with the other woman on her shift. And it was fun to make Grissom a little jealous of Sophia.