Thank you Marlou for the beta, thank you Lauren for just being you... thanks to my L.A. ladies and all the kind people at YTDAW. Thank you READERS for sticking this out with me.

"It's been what?" Catherine began, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

Sara turned to her slowly. "Hmm?"

Catherine glanced at her passenger quickly and turned back to the road... as if traffic was really going to move at all. "How long have you two been together? Seven months?"

Sara picked a piece of fluff of her shirt and answered non-commitally. "Ten months, give or take a few days."

Catherine nodded, smirking her little 'know-it-all' grin and kept her eyes focused on the road. "So you guys are pretty serious..." And there she was, pressing the issue...

"I guess," Sara said, shrugging. 'Fuck that," she thought. 'We are so serious...'

"He produced the rock yet?"

Sara sat up in her seat in shock. "Excuse me?"

Catherine grinned in that glossy way she was prone to and stared down her companion. "Engagement? Nothing on the horizon?"

Sara simply stared at her, dumbstruck. She had been considering it. In fact, Sara had been thinking about proposing to him. It, at least, would have been original. "Marriage, Catherine?"

"I'm sorry. I'm being a bitch," she admitted. Sara was always envious of the way that Catherine could speak her mind without thinking of the repercussions.

The two women were quiet in the stuffy interior of the Denali.

"No, I don't need to be married to him to hope that we'll be together for..." She was about to say 'forever' but slipped her sentence before she could spit it all out. "That'll we'll be together."

Catherine seemed satisfied with her answer and began sighing and huffing at the traffic. Sara eventually was fed up with the other woman's noises and turned on the radio. "Good song," Catherine acknowledged and then they were both silent again.

After a moment or two, Sara perked up. "I mean, it's not like I expect anything... or anything." Catherine nodded and smiled. "And I'm happy with how we are now." Again, Catherine nodded.

"You know, Eddie and I-not the best example, I know-Eddie and I broke up and made up five times before we were married."

Sara sighed and slumped back against her seat. "Then I guess we have four and a half more to go"

"Catherine just informed me that in order to be an actual couple... we have to break up and make up at least... three more times," Sara said, dropping herself down on his sofa tiredly. Grissom looked up over his glasses from his study of the monarch butteyfly.

Wondering how to proceed, he licked his lips and managed to etch a smile onto his face. "Yes, but if we were going by the Catherine rubric of relationships, there's a great probability that you and I would have had to be sleeping together... years ago."

A large, long yawn escaped her mouth and then she smiled. "Think of all the issues that would have caused."

"Or prevented," he added with a flick of his finger.

"Or that," she acquiesced, pushing her hair out of her face and yawning again. The double shift she had just worked was beginning to weigh heavy on her eyelids. "Want food?"

"Sure," he murmured, distractedly. "Whatever you want is fine with me." And with that he went back to his analysis.

Forty minutes later she'd produced some sort of potato casserole and a simple salad and had called him to the table, refusing to allow him to eat at his desk.

Her domesticity was beginning to frighten him. She would do the dishes after dinner, tidy up his bathroom, made sure he ate breakfast... and lunch... and dinner. She'd begun insisting that he take Centrum right along with her and had gone so far as to suggest that they begin a running regiment together too.

He'd laid down the line there. He had told her that the old adage was true: he wouldn't run unless he was being chased. He'd then amended his statement to say that even if he was being chased he'd probably only jog at a moderately speedy pace.

Sara set out plates and silverware and even lit a candle in the middle of the table, because she could. It felt nice just to make dinner and sit and act normal, though normal was absolutely twenty-seven hundred miles in some direction radiating from the point that they were at.

Neither of them cared; what they had was good. It was good and nice and comfortable. He kissed her before sitting down at the table and filling his plate. They were both quiet for some minutes just eating and glancing at each other. "S'good?" she asked him, gesturing at his plate with her fork. Grissom merely nodded and smiled and took a sip of his water and then both went back to eating in silence.

Sara's mind was full with issues she wanted to resolve, one in particular. She decided that she'd bring it up after dinner. Pushing the potatos around on her plate she began wording her case in her head.

When dinner was through and the plates had been cleared, she made them both tea. He kissed her once more as the kettle whistled and finished with drying the last of the dishes.

Grissom went back to his seat at the desk, cup of tea in hand. It was a mere moment before his head was bent once more, eyes studying the intricate diagrams of the butterflies. Sara followed him back into the living room minutes later, stretching her long, lithe frame out onto the couch. "You ever gonna talk about that thing you said the other day?" she asked, running the tip of her finger over her tea.

"What... would that be?" He didn't bother glancing up, merely turned the page of the book and flitted his eyes over at her just once, for a mere second before continuing his study.

"You know," and another yawn cut off her sentence abruptly. A sour look passed over her face, finding that she was beginning to detest the normal sleeping cycle that she had miraculously fallen victim to. "What you said, the other afternoon when we were in bed..."

He was completely silent, dragging his magnifying glass back and forth over the delicate specimen, seemingly oblivious to the question she had posed. It stayed hanging in the air between them, until he finally looked up, placing the magnifying glass down gently. "Ah that," he finally acknowledged, dragging the glasses from his face.

Sara nodded and continued to swirl the tea around aimlessly, just to give her mind something to focus on.

"I'd buy you a ring and proceed with all of the fanfare, but that just wouldn't do," he surmised and she nodded.

They stared at each other in the warm, yellow glow of the living room.

"But I had meant... what I implied, though my timing was surely less than... perfect."

Sara nodded again and bit her lip. "But the process seems so... incredibly not... us."

She nodded one last time and sat up, placing her elbows on her knees. "I'm with you on the no fanfare thing," she pointed out and was quick to follow with, "and the loving you thing. That's first," she smirked, "Obviously..." Grissom nodded, just barely, but seemed to be following what she was saying.

"But," she continued.

The inevitable 'but'. It stabbed him in the chest repeatedly in that one moment she paused before speaking her next words. It slapped him in the face, poured a bucket of ice water over his head and pushed him off a cliff. Her smile snatched him one second before his body smashed against the ground.

"I damn well better be getting a ring."