The bed moved of its own accord and Grissom's sleep-muddled mind sent a weak warning signal to the rest of his body. His brain slipped a notch out of the deep sleep it had been in and fired off a few electrical pulses, yielding the mostly-unconscious thought that the movement might be the result of an earthquake.
Noting the inherent danger in the connection between earthquake and sleep, his brain set a few more synapses to work and Grissom began to be aware of the fact that he was asleep. Still not conscious, and with no desire to be, Grissom let his brain spin while he hung suspended in the area between sleep and waking.
A few seconds later, the answer came back and he slipped another inch away from sleep, enough to allow him to open an eye and stare at the wall facing him. He couldn't immediately identify the wall, which meant that it was neither his bedroom wall in Las Vegas nor the wall of the studio apartment he had lived in while working in LA. Brain productivity cranked up another notch and Grissom realized that he was in New Jersey, on the east coast, and not in California or Nevada; given that fact, he decided that an earthquake was highly unlikely.
Well, if it wasn't an earthquake, then it probably wasn't dangerous. Passing that message up to the worried portion of his brain, he rolled back into his pillow, burying his face in it, and began the descent back into full sleep.
The bed moved again, this time with an audible squeak, and the worrywart in his head jumped back to attention, this time adding a splash of adrenaline to the mix. It became an effort to keep his eyes closed, and after a few seconds he let them drift open again. There was no sensory input for a long minute as Grissom waited for the sound to come again, and then he felt more movement. More awake this time, he was able to pinpoint the movement as being behind his back, and queried his brain for possible causes of the movement.
His slushy-feeling mind was spared the task, however, when the movement was abruptly ended by something bumping into his back. Startled by this happening, neurons began firing like it was the Fourth of July, and he was zapped to full consciousness.
Within seconds of coming awake, Grissom had formed a theory and was rolling over onto his other side. Milliseconds ticked by as his brain was put to work once again, this time processing the visual input, and he could almost feel a small "ding!" in his head as things clicked.
The entity that had been moving his bed was, indeed, the same entity that had just bumped into him, and said entity was possessed of a tangle of dark hair and a pale hand.
Some time between 10 o'clock, when he'd fallen asleep, and now – whenever "now" was – Sara had joined him on the futon. She appeared to have brought her own sheet, and had settled herself on top of his blankets, shielding their bodies from direct contact, but that knowledge made Grissom no less aware of the current overriding fact – that Sara was on the futon with him, spontaneously and of her own will.
Ok, he was officially cheerful.
Moving tentatively, he raised his arm beneath his blanket until his cloth-covered hand made contact with her shoulder. "Sara?" It was barely a hint of a whisper, uttered on a gentle exhalation; he wasn't all that sure he wanted her to wake up and answer him, anyway.
"Mmm." Sara's eyes didn't open.
Good, she was still asleep. He mentally poked himself for almost causing a moment that would have been awkward at best, and lowered his arm back to its original position safely away from the form sleeping next to him.
He was about to roll back to face the wall when her sleepy voice, nearly as quiet as his had been, said, "Gris?"
His eyes jumped to her face and met her half-open ones. "Yeah?" He lowered his head back into the pillow so that their faces were on the same level, only inches apart.
"Gotta talk to you tomorrow." She offered no further comment, and her eyes closed again.
Well, he thought, that had been rather nonsensical. "Mmm," he offered in response, then: "Are you cold?"
"Mmrugh?" Opening her mouth when she responded was apparently beyond her unconscious abilities, and he chose to take the grunt as a yes.
Prying the edge of his blanket out from under Sara's dead weight, he flipped it back slightly. "Come on, get in."
"Mmm." Her eyes still didn't open, but she obeyed his command and inched over until the bottom sheet was beneath her back, then lay passively as he moved the cover back up, covering both of them.
Their bodies were barely touching, but Grissom could feel the cold coming off of her skin – what had made her think that he wouldn't share and that she had to bring her own thin sheet? Hoping nothing embarrassing came of it, Grissom moved up until her side touched his stomach and curled an arm around one of hers, which was flung above her head on the pillow. The cliché "cold hands, warm heart," crossed his mind as he covered her cool hand with his own, interlacing their fingers, and lay back onto the pillow. His eyes flickered closed and Grissom's sleep picked up where it had left off, with only the addition of another warm body to the pool of sensations his brain ignored for the next four hours.
Something embarrassing came of it, of course – just his luck, and something he ought to have had the forethought to avoid.
The sun was beginning to set when Grissom opened his eyes again, and after scanning the room for a clock he learned that it was 4:30 PM, giving them half an hour until Sara's alarm went off.
He had absolutely no idea of what Sara would think or say when she awoke. Had she really joined him willingly, or had there been another reason? Had she sleepwalked, or had a nightmare? There were no answers to be had until her eyes opened, too, and so he relaxed into the bed, fully awake and watching her sleeping form.
The clock had just turned to 4:40 when he found a pair of brown eyes studying him. Neither of them said anything for a long second, and then Grissom managed a weak, "Good morning."
Sara's eyes opened wider and he could tell that she was processing where she was and why. Whatever answers she came up with, though, didn't seem to alarm her much, and she gave him a small smile. " 'Morning. How long have you been up?"
"Not long."
Sara was quiet again as she linked her hands above her head and stretched, arching her back, causing her body to press against his for a few seconds. When she had relaxed to her former position, he noticed that the smile on her face had become wider. She continued to look at him, and finally he could no longer stand the glint of amusement in her eyes. "What?" he asked.
A suppressed chuckle shook her shoulders. "Nothing. It's just been a while since I've woken up to some aspects of this situation."
He rolled his eyes. "Obviously, since as far as I know, you've never woken up in New Jersey with me in your bed."
"Well yeah, there's that." She made an effort to wipe the smile from her face, then moved a little closer to him, curling her body toward his until her knees bumped his thigh. "I kind of like this."
Raising his eyebrows, he said, "Yeah, I do too – but that doesn't answer my question."
"What question?" she asked, looking at him with innocent eyes.
"I asked why you were so amused about the situation."
He could see the contemplation journey across her face as she tried to think of an answer to give him. "Don't be mad, okay?" she finally said.
That, of course, preemptively set him on the edge of anger. "I won't."
She obviously didn't believe him, because she let out a sigh before speaking. "I just thought it was kinda amusing. I mean yeah, waking up next to you is pretty damn weird to begin with, but then there's this . . ." She moved her knees up to just below his waist, and as his attention focused there, Grissom knew what she was talking about.
He could feel his face begin to turn red, and he immediately pulled away. "Sorry."
She reached out a slim arm and let it rest on his upper arm. "No, no, I didn't mean you should apologize or anything. It just . . ." She shrugged, still smiling a little. "Put the situation that last millimeter into surrealism."
"It's not that surreal, Sara," he muttered. "Biology's a concrete science."
The laughter finally burst out of her and she could feel Grissom stiffen up. Stiffen up! – the thought brought a fresh burst of giggles out of her. "Mmm," she muttered after a minute, getting control of herself, "sorry. I'm not laughing at you, 'cause there's nothing to laugh at. I'm just . . . it, uh . . ." She gave up on trying apologize, unable to come up with words that didn't sound insulting or crude, and instead she just slid her arms around him and squeezed, letting her face rest against his chest.
Grissom cleared his throat. "I have no idea what you were just trying to communicate to me, but I'll accept whatever it was if you're going to keep doing this." He slid a hand up her back as he spoke, coming to rest on her shoulder. "I could get used to this."
Sara didn't respond to that, and for a moment he thought she'd fallen back to sleep. She shifted her weight then until she was lying on her back again, almost not touching him. "Yeah, it'd be easy, wouldn't it?"
There was definitely a hidden meaning behind those words, and Grissom was afraid he knew what it was. "But . . .?"
She shrugged. " 'But' nothing. I'm just saying."
He could have sworn there was an audible "pop" as his bubble burst. "You were 'just saying.' Okay." He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her. "Suppose you tell me why there's a 'this' to get used to – why you're here rather than there," he added, nodding toward her bedroom. "When I woke up in the middle of the night, you said you needed to talk to me."
"Yeah," she said, sounding highly displeased. "Well, uh, I just wanted to apologize for going off on you this morning."
Grissom cocked an eyebrow and looked at her, waiting for more elucidation, which she hesitantly supplied. "I mean, the thing about you talking to Sophie and Will. I kinda thought about it for a while while I was in bed. That one," she said, moving her eyes toward her bedroom, "not this one. And, oh, I don't know. You made sense for once."
She was in a whimsical mood today, he decided. Chances were that he wasn't going to get her into a deep and meaningful conversation when she was still fighting the giggles about what she'd felt when she snuggled into him. "I made sense, did I? That's always nice to hear." Feeling a bit of whimsy himself, he reached down and twirled a strand of her hair around his finger. "Does that mean I'm forgiven for having a big mouth?"
"It's not that big." She reached up and touched his lips, gently running two fingers over them. "See?"
A jolt of panic rushed through him. What was he supposed to do when she touched him like this? At a loss (a feeling that was becoming uncomfortably familiar to him), he simply let her touch him, neither pulling back from nor leaning into it. When she removed her hand after a few seconds, he reflexively licked his lips quickly where they had been. "I guess that means I am forgiven."
The small smile was back on her face. "Mmm, I guess you are." Without sitting up, she asked, "What time is it?"
"Four fifty-three, why?"
"I don't know." She looked up at him and simultaneously moved closer, dangling her free arm across his waist. "I just don't feel like getting out of bed yet."
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A/N: Did they or didn't they? Will they or won't they? Well if it makes you feel better, I'm not sure either, but I'll be sure to write it in when I figure it out. Geez, I'm so squeamish…