"The Underdog"
Couples: Sara/Warrick and a little bit of Grissom/Catherine
Rating: It depends on your part. But now KSummary: Sara and Warrick discover Catherine and Grissom are together but, in trying to make them jealous, they slowly fall in love. Set after Season 5 with the team back together again.
This Chapter is from Lemonjelly : If you love angst, drama and love, you will trully enjoy her long WarrickSara story called "Wake The Hope": A must for all the WarrickSara lovers !
This chapter is the best romantic chapter of all the story, so if you love fluff, enjoy it !
Chapter Six
Sara stared out of the window of the moving Tahoe without saying a word for a full ten minutes, thinking about everything that's been happening and trying to get her head around this - trying to get her life in order as the world rushed past her window. It wasn't until the car slowed and stopped outside a white-washed marina that she turned to Warrick with a questioning look.
"Boats?" she asked with raised eyebrows. She glanced out across the lake, barely lit in the pre-dawn sky - the small wooden pier tethering a handful of gently bobbing rowing boats lit by a modest string of bare bulbs. A far cry from the touristy, glaring Strip. "It's not even light out!"
Warrick shrugged his shoulders and grinned. "Is it illegal in the state of Nevada to go rowing at night?"
"Will it even be open?" she said, staring doubtfully at the waterside cabin.
"I talked it over with the guy who owns the place." he told her, unbuckling his seat belt.
"He owed me a favour from a while back anyway."
Sara paused before asking one last question in the quiet of the car. "Is this a date?"
He faltered for a moment, not looking at her but out through the windscreen at the calmly drifting row boats. "If we're gonna say we're a couple, we'd better have a go at acting like one, don't you think?" he responded eventually, turning back to her with an overly wide grin. "So, yes, I'm taking you on the most clichéd first date you've ever been on." She looked at him carefully and then smiled, nodding.
"Good plan." she said - but quietly, almost uncertainly as she got down from the car.
Sara wandered out from where he'd parked the car towards the beech planks of the pier, her black autumn boots crunching the gravel as she walked in silence. Warrick locked up the Tahoe and looked up to see her walking slowly down the pier, a silhouette of her backed against the distant glow that overhung The Strip. She moved to the cabin and cupped her hands around her eyes, peering into the darkened room.
"It looks closed to me, 'Rick." she called back. "I think you've got the wrong end of the deal, here."
He chuckled - the sound dispersed freely into the flatlands and waterfronts around - and touched her shoulder lightly in passing. Sara looked after him, watching him stroll down the pier, noticing a shiver run through her from that point on her shoulder where his fingers had been just moments before, for a beat of a second.
"He told me he'd set everything up for me," he informed her, peering into each boat as he passed and squinting through the semi-dark. "Which basically meant oars and drinks. Didn't want to get up at 4am just for us."
"Fair enough," Sara commented vaguely, following him down.
"Works for me." Warrick said, jumping down into a white and blue rowing boat tethered to the end post. "I kind of like working nights. Even though it wreaks havoc with my social life."
"At least you have one, right?" Sara answered, accepting his hand that reached out to steady her step into the swaying boat.
"No, that's the problem." he grinned.
Sara smiled and then shrugged her shoulders as she stood on the dipping boat and looked out across the lake which moved slowly, serenely, in gentle sweeps like breaths of a sleeping earth. "I don't know," she began softly, not needing to raise her voice much higher with standing right beside her and not wanting to, either, in case she interrupted the silence around them. "I like it too. By the time I finish, everyone's still in bed or getting up. Everything's shut, roads are empty and no-one else is around. Sort of like my own world, just for a while." She turned to him and added, "Although now you're here, that sort of ruins it."
Warrick laughed and she poked her tongue out at him.
"Charming," he replied. "Share it with you?"
"Huh?"
"The world," he clarified. "I'll share it with you."
A grin broke onto her face. "Okay - deal." Sara nodded and she took a seat on the wooden beams in the boat. "So - oars and drinks, right?"
"Yep." Warrick said and reached down into the bottom of the boat, grasping two poles in the darkness and bringing them up. "Well, here are the oars."
"Ever rowed before?" she asked him, the thought suddenly occurring to her.
Warrick paused for a moment as though that thought had only just occurred to him too. "No - I guess I'm much more of a city boy," he admitted and then gave her an optimistic smirk. "How hard can it be, right?"
"Where's my life jacket?" Sara remarked playfully and he rolled his eyes.
"You just keep rooting around for those promised drinks," Warrick told her. Sara responded with a light-hearted chuckle and he sliced the oars into the crisp water's surface, gliding them out towards the centre of the lake as she felt around the bottom of the boat.
"Caught anything yet?" he teased, watching her with her face close to his knee-level, feeling blindly around.
"Aha - yes." she answered triumphantly and, with a whoop that echoed through the clear open air around, she held up her hand which was clasped around a can. She held the drink close to read its label in the pallid dawn light.
"Soda," she read and looked at Warrick distastefully. "This wasn't exactly what I had in mind, War."
"No, me neither," he muttered. "I think I need to have a word with this friend. I don't think he takes out many girls."
Sara handed him the soda and pulled out another one that rolled past her feet as Warrick took the boat further out in a sweeping motion. "And you do?" she queried casually.
"Not as many as I would've once hoped," he replied, picking his words with deliberation.
"Why 'once'?" Sara leant towards him, interested in his choice. Warrick looked at her and saw it was a genuine question rather than test. He leant the oars down on the edges of the boat, allowing himself free hands to open his can of cola.
"I guess I'm getting old," Warrick answered with a cheeky grin, knowing he was avoiding a direct answer as he said it. "Too old for the rock and roll lifestyle of drink and women the whole time."
"Then perhaps it's a good thing we've only got soda," Sara mused. "Otherwise you might be way in over your head here."
They drifted along the mirror-perfect surface of the lake for a while in silence and watched sunlight start to peek over distant suburban edges until he turned back to her, considering her face for a while in the yellow autumn early morning light before speaking.
"So how is your most clichéd date working out for you?" Warrick probed with a smile.
Sara turned the soda can over in her hand and looked around the empty lake for a moment. "It's not actually as clichéd as you say it is, you know."
"Really?" he raised an eyebrow. "Well this should swing it." He cleared his throat ceremoniously and set down his soda can.
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" he began dramatically. "Thou art more lovely and more temperate -"
He cut himself off momentarily when he noticed her giggling at him behind her shirt cuff.
"What?" he protested with a smile. "It's Shakespeare - I learnt it especially."
Sara shook her head and tried to put on a straight face. "I'm sorry; it's very nice - do go on."
"Rough winds do shake..." he went on, flinging his arms out in an over-the-top gesture but, in doing so, knocked both precariously balanced oars off the edges of the boat to disappear beneath the surface of the lake, ripples spreading evenly out where they once had been.
"Oh crap." Warrick muttered, leaning over each edge. Sara burst out laughing and watched in amusement as he rolled up his sleeves hurriedly and plunged both arms into the cold waters to try and grasp the sinking oars.
"I hate to disappoint," Sara began. "But I've never been on a first date quite like this."
He sat up, having recovered the oars but at the same time drenched his sleeves up to the shoulder. "Neither have I," he uttered before composing himself again. "Shall I carry on with the poem?"
Sara shrugged her shoulders. "If you must."
"It's Shakespeare! It's a classic!" he insisted, feigning horror at her apathy.
"You're starting to sound like Grissom!" She told him, laughing. And then she stopped. And he stopped. They floated on the lake's surface for a moment in a painful silence, the water seeping through his shirt some more.
"Do I remind you of Ca -?" Sara began, almost dreading the answer.
"No." he cut her off immediately. "No. You're...I don't know..."
More silence. Warrick scooped the oars lightly over the water's surface for want of something to break the deafening quiet. In the water, he noticed, the glowing light from the sun creeping up over the horizon.
"That's what I took you out to see," he murmured quietly and Sara, who'd been awkwardly studying the can of cola in her hands, looked up to see the sun rise over the waterfront and a smile spread across her face.
Warrick looked at her, watching her in the growing light: just two in a boat at dawn, drifted out in the middle of the Nevadan lake while all the world slept on - as though it belonged to them, just them, and just for a while. But when she turned back to him, the smile vanished.
"Are you alright?" he asked gently.
Sara frowned. "I'm confused," she replied eventually. "I'm confused and it scares me."
He paused and took a breath. "So you feel it too?"
She seemed to freeze up for a second and gripped her drinks can tighter. "I think we should head back to shore." she said softly, staring hard into the bottom of the boat and avoiding his eyes. He didn't say anything in reply but took up the oars and wordlessly rowed the little boat back towards the harbour.
TO BE CONTINUE...Next Sunday !