"You're not hiding out here forever, Sara. I hope you know that."
"Jeff! You said I could stay as long as I wanted!"
"And I'm not saying you can't stay now. I'm saying you can't hide here. You've been here for five days and you haven't done anything but mope around the house. If you want to stay, you're gonna have to start looking for a job and acting like you really want to get your life together instead of mooching off me."
"Excuse me? Mooching? Listen, if you don't want me here just say it and I'm gone. I can find my own place to stay, I don't need you."
Jeff laid a hand on her shoulder when she moved to walk away. "Hey, hey, slow down. Of course I want you here. I haven't seen you in almost two years and there's no way I'm going to send my little sister to a hotel in a strange place when I have more than enough room here."
"Then why are you telling me I can't 'hide out here'?" Sara shook her head and shrugged off his hand. "I'm not getting you."
He set down his briefcase and shooed her toward the kitchen. "Go. I'm making coffee and we're sitting down to talk about this." When he'd herded her in, he got to work and set two shots of espresso perking, then sat down facing her. "Ok. Let me go through this again. You can stay here as long as you want. I want you to stay here as long as you want."
"Then why . . ."
"BUT. What I don't want you to do is to use me and my house as a hiding place just because you don't want to go back to Vegas and deal with whatever sent you running here in the first place. Are you following me?"
Her eyes narrowed but she nodded. "Yeah, I think I get the point. But I'm not 'hiding' here, as you put it. I'm considering."
"Considering what, Sara? Every time I've asked you what the hell is going on, you put me off. I think it's about time you told me why you're here to begin with so I can try to understand what it is that you're considering." He got up to retrieve the coffee, sliding one cup to her and keeping the other. "So drink up and spill it, kid."
"One sec." She dug in her purse and retrieved a bag of M&Ms. Breaking it open, she palmed five and stuffed them into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Letting out a sigh, she sat back. "That's more like it. Ok. You really want to know all this? You're going to laugh at me."
"I'm not going to laugh at you! Honest to god, I care about what's happening to you and I want to know if I can help."
"Fine." Another helping of candy, then a sip of espresso, and she began to speak. "So there's this guy named Grissom . . ."
"The old dude. I freakin' knew it!"
"Would you shut UP? If you want to hear this, then listen, don't make smartass comments," she snapped. When he held up his hands in surrender, she gave him a warning look and continued. "As I was saying, there's this guy named Grissom who I've known practically since I left school. He was the reason I moved to Vegas – he called when he was having a staffing crisis, and I was bored with California anyway, so I went up there." Catching the look on his face, she waved a hand. "I know, you know all this. But it's part of the story, so just listen.
"So I went to Vegas. I hadn't seen him in a few years and I figured at the very least I could get to see my friend before I went back home. We'd spent a lot of time together when we first met and I had a crush on him, like a teacher-student thing, so I was all for it.
"Then when I got there I decided to stay, since it was one of the best labs I'd ever seen, and the people were pretty nice, at least considering that they didn't want me there. And best of all Grissom was there. Problem was, the more time I spent there the bigger my crush got. And we're talking major crush. Like, I didn't even bother to look at any other guys because he is – was – it."
Jeff cut her off before she could start her next sentence. "So this whole thing was about him. I asked you that before and you said it wasn't, you liar. Ok, so you have a crush on this older guy who taught you at one point, so does half the world. What the hell happened that suddenly you can't even look at him anymore?"
Another pile of M&Ms, this time nearly an entire handful, and she sighed. "You do realize that you're sitting here with me watching me eat chocolate? And you don't find this at all strange?"
He grinned. "I thought maybe it was some chemical thing. Coffee and chocolate . . . maybe you needed a huge caffeine fix, or a serotonin boost." He helped himself to a candy, then raised an eyebrow. "So? Keep talking."
"Ok well like I was saying the longer I stayed the more into him I got, but he was doing the opposite. The longer I was in his lab, the less he worked with me or even bothered to talk to me. I almost quit, like, a year and a half ago – I was gonna check out the FBI . . . but then he sent me a plant and I decided that maybe I was just being pessimistic and that I'd give Vegas another chance. And then the next time we worked a case together he was majorly nice to me, and I was like, 'Ok everything's cool again.'"
"But it wasn't, I assume, since you're here."
"Right." Her face darkened and she stared down at the table, looking as though she wished she could punch it. "It wasn't 'cool again.' Things went downhill again from there, and he was hardly talking to me. But the worst thing – this is what really got to me – is that it wasn't consistent. One day he'd be nice and act like he actually valued me and my input, then the next day he'd stare through me like I wasn't even there and talk to me like I was five, if he talked to me at all. Do you have any idea how freaking frustrating that is? I could never tell whether today would be good or bad, whether I should walk into work happy or depressed.
"So I was already on edge to begin with, and then we had a substance explode in the DNA lab, and the whole place went to hell. I got cut up a little bit but Greg – he's the DNA tech – got knocked out and badly burned, so I was sitting outside on the curb, waiting to see him when the paramedics brought him out, and Grissom suddenly comes up to me and starts asking questions. Was I ok, did anything hurt, and so on.
"I told him I was fine, but then he picked up my hand and looked at the slash on it" – she held out her hand to her brother, showing him the still-fading scar – "and went, 'This doesn't look good, honey.' He called me honey, and at the most random time Then he just walked away again."
Jeff caught her hand and took a close look at it. "This was deep, huh?"
"It was only about an inch deep . . . I got stitches, but it wasn't like my hand was going to fall off or something." With her free hand she upended the M&Ms bag into her mouth and polished off what remained inside it. "Can I have my hand back, please?" she mumbled through a mouthful of melting chocolate.
"As long as you keep talking and finish the story."
"Yeah, I am. Chill. Ok so as I was saying, he called me 'honey' then walked away. So the next day, after I got my head together and figured out what the hell was going on, I decided that I was sick of being so off balance and I wanted to get this shit settled, one way or another. So after shift two days after the explosion I went to his office and asked him out to dinner. I figured he'd either say yes or no, and either way I'd have my answer."
"I think I can see where this is going." He drank the last bit of his espresso and gave her a sympathetic look. "He said no."
"Yeah, he did, but then he said, 'I don't know what to do about . . . this'," she clarified, adding a mocking emphasis to the word "this."
Jeff blinked. "What's 'this'?"
"I guess he meant my crush on him. Or something like that. I don't know, he didn't exactly stop to explain things. I tried again just to be sure and he said no again, and I was like, 'Fine. Well by the time you do know what to do it'll be too late.' Or something like that, I wasn't exactly rational at the time. And of course he had no response to that – he never has a response when I say something that would actually require him to express emotion – so I left.
"And then when I got home, I got to thinking about everything, and I realized that the whole reason I had stayed there was him, and now he was just giving me more and more reasons not to stay. So I thought about it for a couple weeks, and when things didn't get better at work, I decided that there wasn't any point in sticking around any longer. That's when I called you."
There was a minute of silence as he processed this, then Jeff sat back and crossed his arms. "What else?"
"What do you mean what else? I just told you what happened."
"That wasn't everything, Sara Ann. There's more between when you called me and now that you're not telling me."
"Was too everything."
"Was not."
"Too!"
"Not!" Realizing that they were arguing like children, Jeff cut himself off. "If you don't tell me the rest of it I'm not feeding your coffee habit anymore and I'm moving you to a room without cable."
"Ew, you bastard!"
"Yep, that's me. Just don't let mom hear you say that. Now come on and tell me the rest."
She sighed. "Fine. Well when I was on the phone with you he called - that was who was on call waiting – and started asking me what was wrong. He said I'd been acting weird lately and was I ok, and could we talk. I was like, 'I'm fine, and no we can't talk, I'm on the other line,' and hung up on him. So then I finished talking to you and hung up and went to my bedroom to pack.
"Maybe an hour later I heard a knock on my door and figured it was the idiot pizza boy delivering pizza to the wrong apartment like he always does, so I open the door and there's Grissom standing there holding a pizza for absolutely no reason I can ascertain. I asked him why he was there, and he gave me the 'You've been acting unusual' spiel again. Then he said I'd sounded stressed so he brought me pizza."
"Um, Sara . . . and you're saying this guy knows you? He hasn't figured out yet that you're stressed 24/7, no matter what?"
"That's what I said to him! He just shrugged it off and said well, he'd brought me dinner, so at least I got a free meal. That didn't sit too well with me, as I'm sure you figured out, and I told him I was not eating a dinner that he'd paid for. Ok then here's the part that pissed me off so bad I wanted to hit him: he goes, "Oh, well there goes my plan for asking you out on a date!'"
"Ouch. And you managed to not hit him?"
"Yeah, aren't you proud of me? I shut the door and yelled at him to go away, but he told me he wasn't leaving until he knew I was ok. So I said I was fine, I took the pizza, and he left."
"That everything?" he asked skeptically.
"Not quite. We've been e-mailing while I've been here. Well, we were. I haven't answered his since the second day because I don't know what to say. When I wrote and told him I might be gone for good he wrote back asking what he could do to make me stay. And I haven't come up with anything yet. So . . . I just didn't answer him."