A/N: My undying gratitude to Marlou, my incredible beta. Thank you! Any continued errors in this chapter should be attributed to me and me alone.
Huge shout-out to MackenzieW, my lone reviewer for chapter 18! But now it's begging time. Only one review, so I must be doing something wrong here. How can I know what it is if you don't tell me? Pretty please? With sugar on top? I promise, I take constructive criticism well. Just ask Marlou. I haven't yelled at her or anything. Well, not yet anyway. -)
Spoilers: "Play with Fire," "Butterflied"
Disclaimer: This disclaimer brought to you by the letters I, O, and U. I only wish it was brought to you by C, S, and I. -)
Chapter 19: Cuts Like a KnifeFrom somewhere amidst the distant memories of a Catholic upbringing, he could dimly recall the Biblical account of Joshua leading the Israelites into battle while God Himself caused the sun to stand still for an entire day as they fought. And Grissom vaguely wondered if the Almighty had done it again.
For time had indeed stopped. He was lost, utterly transfixed by her eyes. He couldn't remember ever looking into them this deeply before. Then, again, he couldn't remember much of anything at all.
His mind was not functioning in its normally logical manner. His powers of observation were certainly intact, and quite possibly keener than they ever had been. He heard the tiny hitch in her breathing in perfect synchronicity with his own ragged breaths, he smelled the faintest hint of a juniper fragrance as it wafted off her skin, he saw the golden flecks embedded in her chocolate irises that made her eyes appear to expand and contract and never give the same pattern twice.
But, while the sensory observations were coming fast and furious, the electricity emanating from Sara's eyes had short-circuited his typically analytical mental processes and rerouted his brain onto a decidedly more emotional path. He hadn't exactly lost the capacity for conscious thought, but it certainly seemed impaired at the moment. The vague notion that Sara must have some sort of bewitching powers, that she was some kind of modern-day Medusa, presented itself fleetingly as a valid idea but was gone before his overtaxed brain could process it as such. He barely had the opportunity to hope she wouldn't turn him to stone.
What he could do – and probably more intensely than at any prior moment in his life – was feel. He felt everything – in polar opposites. There was pain, and there was pleasure. There was agony, and there was ecstasy. And there was heartrending sorrow. But, on its heels, there was an unadulterated joy so overwhelming that it threatened to consume him, so torrential that he feared he would be swept away on a raging flood of chocolate waves with golden flecks.
And, borne of the bliss that seemed to permeate his very soul, came a longing so painfully sweet that he could no more have stopped himself from fulfilling it than he could have stopped the sun from rising. He ached to touch her, to feel her skin under his, if only for a moment. And so he reached out to reverently graze the tips of his fingers against her cheek, his touch so light it was barely there. But Sara felt it and leaned into his hand, her eyes slowly closing at his caress.
And, as the circuit of their gazes was broken, so was the spell. He could think again. But all he could think was that he wanted to go back to feeling. And he reached his fingers around to grip the back of her neck and pull her towards him, leaning in slowly until his lips finally – finally – met hers.
Staggering emotion. Pure elation. Indescribable pleasure. Those were the words he would later use to characterize that instant, but they were all so pitifully inadequate to explain what he felt. Despite a vocabulary that any wordsmith would envy, Gil Grissom had always found it difficult to express his own emotions. Thus, he had developed the habit of borrowing the words of others for the task. But, today, even the poetry of the Bard himself seemed woefully insufficient.
Sensations flooded his synapses from every direction, but his sluggish thought processes could only handle one at a time, storing the rest for more thorough assessment later. Sara's lips under his own were soft and surprisingly willing, and the shock of his kiss had left her mouth slightly open, granting him easy access.
He tilted his head and deepened the kiss automatically, prompting a barely audible whimper from her. But it was enough, and he emitted his own deep groan in response. At the sound, she reached up to place a hand on either side of his face, pulling him toward her hungrily and stroking the soft whiskers for just a moment before gently ending the kiss.
She leaned her forehead against his with her eyes closed, knowing she was hiding but unsure what she was hiding from. His rejection… or his acceptance. And it was that very confusion that pushed her into action.
Hating it even as she did so, she forced herself to pull away, and her mutinous body fought her every step of the way. Seemingly of their own accord, her fingertips trailed slowly over his beard in the path of retreat, sending tiny shockwaves of pleasure down her spine.
When her hands were finally free from the dangerous territory of Grissom's face, she opened her eyes to look at him, feeling more like some objective third-party than an active participant. His eyes were closed, impossibly long lashes splayed across his cheeks like the wings of a butterfly. She watched his chest heave as he struggled desperately to bring his erratic breathing under control. The whole situation was surreal, as though she'd entered some alternate universe where the man she had wanted forever kissed her like he wanted her, too.
But it was the continued jolt of electricity generated by his hand against her cheek that brought her fully back to reality, and she shied away from his touch as if it burned. Her flinch shook Grissom from his reverie, and he opened his eyes and reluctantly raised them to hers.
Only to meet his fears headlong. Her face was pure bewilderment, and her voice was edged with reproach as she asked, "What was that?"
He cocked his head to the side, slightly mystified as to how he should respond to a question with such an obvious answer. Then again, maybe hewas more out of practice than he thought. "Um… I, uh… k-kissed you," he managed to stammer.
She glared at him, her confusion rapidly transforming into anger. "Yeah, I realize that, Grissom," she spat. "What I don't really get is – why?"
"Sara…" He swallowed hard as he stared at her, and even the memory of her mouth under his couldn't prevent the icy fingers of fear that now gripped his heart. The clear and honest answer was… he had wanted to. Probably more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life. And he didn't regret a second of it. He was convinced that the memory alone could sustain him for the rest of his life. It was the one time in his lonely existence that he had ever acted on pure emotion, and the reward had been far beyond anything he could have ever imagined. But telling her that would be more of a revelation than either of them could handle. Well, certainly beyond what I can, he thought bitterly. He heaved a defeated sigh as he shifted in his seat and reached to turn the key in the ignition. "I'm sorry," he mumbled, and the resignation in his tone only fueled Sara's fury.
"You're sorry!" she asked, and her voice was filled with incredulous frustration. "Yeah, you are." The sarcasm dripped from her words as she turned to face the front windshield and angrily tugged the seat belt more tightly around herself. When he didn't respond, she continued agitatedly, "I don't believe you, Grissom. I mean, I distinctly recall being turned down in no uncertain terms when I asked you to have dinner with me. You said no like it was the most ridiculous idea you'd ever heard."
He winced in response but said nothing. He had replayed that scene in his mind so many times that he felt almost outside of it now. He had analyzed it from every angle in his own private theater, but he still hadn't figured out how it could have gone differently. The only thing he knew was that what he had wanted to say and what he had needed to say were at opposite extremes.
She sighed at the silence, her anger slowly trickling away and leaving only fatigue in its wake. Keeping her eyes studiously fixed on the road ahead, she told him, "Then I watched you lay it all on the line for a suspect accused of killing a woman who looked like me. It wasn't that hard to see it wasn't just a ploy to get him talking. And you made it pretty plain to anyone observing that, even though you might have wanted to, you just couldn't do it."
She heard his sharp intake of breath and, whether it was from her emphasis on his exact words or the revelation that she'd been an eyewitness, she couldn't be sure. Regardless, she ignored it as she plunged ahead. "So you'll forgive me if I don't really get this, Grissom. I'm not quite understanding the leap of logic that led you from 'I don't know what to do about this' and 'I couldn't do it' to kissing me senseless in some random parking lot."
Sara closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat. She expected to feel pain, or satisfaction, or anger, or… something. But, in actuality, she just felt drained. And very numb. Some distant part of her brain wondered when she'd feel the pain of the gaping hole in her heart, but mostly she just didn't care.
"You don't trust me."
His quiet comment was a statement, not a question and, for some reason, that hit a nerve. She snapped her head up to glare at him. "Not with my heart."
One four-word statement for another. And it was gratifying to watch the way he squinted his eyes slightly in reaction to her words, to see that he felt it. Good. I want him to feel it.
She tried to hold on to the anger that sustained her, but it seeped away as her eyes wandered over the features of a profile she knew better than she should. The lines around his eyes that deepened during the bad cases. The jaw that squared when he stood strong for his convictions. The mouth that she could still taste… Not going there, she reprimanded herself. But the only feeling that remained now was fatigue, and she sighed deeply as she leaned her head back against the seat once more.
She was silent for a long time, and he wondered if she'd fallen asleep. When she finally broke the silence, it was in a voice so soft that it was barely more than a whisper. But her words might as well have been shouted from the top of the MGM Grand for all their resonance in his battered soul. "I can't trust you with that, Grissom. It hurts too much."
With her eyes closed, she couldn't see him blink back the pain from the gaping hole in his own heart.
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Sara awoke with a start when the Denali's engine ceased its rhythmic drone. She had managed to fall asleep on the ride to his townhouse, a fact that surprised her. Sleep had been elusive since her late teens, and her body had long ago adapted to the constant deprivation. But she refused to allow herself to speculate on why slumber had been so easy to come by for the last few days, and she gave her head a quick shake as she reached for the bag and case file at her feet. Without so much as a glance at her companion, she quickly unbuckled her safety belt and exited the SUV.
"Sara, wait." She was taken aback by the ferocity in his voice, and it didn't occur to her to disobey. He was at her side in an instant, his eyes flashing angrily. "Don't do something foolish just because you're angry with me. You're here so I can protect you; let me do that."
She bit back her scathing reply because his voice had changed during the last sentence, had softened so that he was nearly pleading, and she could only nod in response. He gave her a grateful smile and lifted his eyes to survey the parking lot.
He didn't touch her as they walked towards the building, but he remained close, and his eyes constantly skimmed their surroundings in his search for threats. But, far from being comforting, it only served to confuse her more. When Grissom finally unlocked his front door and moved to the side to allow her to pass, she brushed by him briskly, heading directly for the guest room and barely breaking stride when she heard his voice from behind her. "Hey, Sara? I'm going to take a shower. Just in case you need me."
I won't. Instead of giving voice to the bitterness, she responded brusquely, "OK. Thanks." And, without another word, she walked into the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her. But that was as far as she got because the click of the door latch sounded so eerily final and, for whatever reason, she suddenly couldn't stem the flow of tears that had been building for what seemed a lifetime.
The briny trickles ran down her cheeks in parallel streams, but her emotions poured forth in merciful silence. Slowly, she leaned back against the door and allowed herself to slump to the ground, a puddle of miserable humanity dripping sorrow onto the hardwood floor of unfeeling reality. The salt burned the sensitive skin of her face, but it was a healing pain, and she reveled in the feel of it.
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Grissom ducked his head under the scalding spray, wincing at the pain but forcing himself to remain in place, welcoming the burn of the water on his skin. His concentration on the physical discomfort helped to drown out the greater hurt from the sting of Sara's words. But the hot water was punishing in its own right, and he found that he was comforted by the penance.
As the stream flowed through his hair and over his neck, he allowed her diatribe to replay in his mind. "… recall being turned down"… "… you just couldn't do it"… "… hurts too much"… "… leap of logic…" He nearly laughed at the bitter irony of it all. How fitting that, now that he had finally worked up the courage to face his fears and pursue his dreams, it was Sara who was pushing him away.
He sighed as he mulled over her words. The phrase "leap of logic" kept repeating itself in his head; it resonated with him in a troublesome sort of way, and it took a moment to understand why. And then it hit him. While kissing her had merely been the next stage in a very logical progression for him, Sara hadn't been privy to his inner thoughts. She didn't understand that he had merely taken another step along a path that began when Brass had deposited her in his living room – no, wait, this journey had begun long before that in a lecture hall in northern California when his eyes had first landed on a lanky brunette with a gap between her teeth. Regardless of where it started, he didn't want it to end with her angry monologue in the cab of a company-owned SUV. Not over something as silly as a simple lack of communication.
Star-cross'd lovers, he thought, and the quote made him smile. Comparing his relationship with Sara to that of two fictitious teenagers in ancient Italy was probably high on everyone's list of "just wrong" – including his own. But, on some level, it rang true. While he was admittedly far inferior to Romeo in his ability to express himself, he couldn't help but identify with the boy's struggles for his true love. "With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls/For stony limits cannot hold love out." Stony limits, indeed. It was high time he o'er-perched.
Decision made, he closed his eyes and tilted his head back, allowing the water to course over his face and throat, washing away his transgressions. The steaming liquid flowed freely over his cheeks until it reached the edges of his beard, where it collected in great droplets that eventually hit the porcelain floor with a resounding splash. And the hindrance to his purification bothered him on some fundamental level. He slid open the shower door to reach for his razor.
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Sara knew she should probably feel awkward about rummaging through the contents of Grissom's refrigerator, but she didn't. She was hungry and, at the moment, that particular need sort of overrode all else – including the trepidation she felt at viewing various dishes of God-knows-what and multiple cardboard cartons she was relatively certain did not contain leftover Chinese food. She was thankful he had cleared space to give her the entire bottom drawer when they had come back from the grocery store yesterday. And she was even more grateful that the drawer had previously only contained produce and not anything… growing.
She carefully arranged the root beer Nick had picked up for her into the back of the drawer before pulling out a container of yogurt and a banana. Regardless of how angry the man made her, the fact remained that Grissom had opened his home to her and had been willing to protect her. That had to count for something. The least she could do was make him his first root beer float. But not today, she thought with a rueful smile as she shoved the drawer closed. I can't deal wi-
"Sara."
She jumped guiltily at the voice and slammed the refrigerator door much harder than necessary before turning to face him quickly. "Hey, Gri-"
The comment died on her lips, and her mouth fell open when she saw his face. Grissom with wet hair and a towel around his shoulders would have been more than enough to derail her train of thought. But this was Grissom with wet hair, a towel, and… a goatee. Oh. My. God. Can't. Breathe.
He was looking at her strangely, and she suddenly realized that she hadn't spoken in quite some time. Swallowing hard against an abruptly Sahara-dry mouth, she managed to croak, "Hey," and her voice sounded odd even to her own ears. She felt a little dizzy and hoped, somewhat irrationally, that she wouldn't embarrass herself by fainting.
He cocked his head to the side as he regarded her, and she watched in fascination as an unruly curl lying against his forehead shifted a bit, leaving a solitary water droplet in its former home. The liquid began a path down his forehead and had almost reached the bridge of his nose before he reached up to brush it away, glancing down at its misshapen form on his fingers before wiping them on his robe. He looked back up at her then and said, "We need to talk."
She couldn't find it within herself to resist and wasn't sure she wanted to anyway. Some deeply buried part of her wanted – no, needed – to hear what he had to say and to say some things herself. This conversation had been a long time coming, and she willingly obeyed as he led the way into the living room and gestured for her to take a seat on the sofa.
Out of respect for her feelings, Grissom seated himself in the armchair, bracing his elbows against his knees as he looked at her. He drank in the sight of Sara seated sideways on his couch, one leg drawn up underneath her and one bent at the knee with her arms wrapped around it. She rested her cheek against that knee and looked at him, clearly waiting on him to initiate their discussion. And it was the very sight of her looking so completely at home there that gave him the courage to continue.
"Sara, I'm not really an eloquent man," he began.
He had dropped his eyes to his hands, and so her loud scoff startled him. He looked up at her then, and the honest effort she saw in his gaze made her sorry for her irate response. He didn't deserve that, and she really needed to change her attitude and give him a chance. Contritely, she apologized. "I'm sorry. Really." And, with open hands, she gestured for him to continue.
"It's OK," he replied, and his look of relief was rather endearing. "I guess I deserved that." He smiled self-deprecatingly and looked back at his hands, clenched together in a tight grip that nearly turned the knuckles white. "Um, I, uh…" His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. This was even harder than he'd ever imagined – and he always knew it would be the most difficult thing he ever had to do.
Suddenly, he needed to move, and he pushed himself out of the chair, pacing across the living room and back as Sara watched in a wide-eyed wonder that he could see from the corner of his eye. He brought one big hand up to sweep it across his face and found himself drawing strength from his own clean-shaven cheeks. He didn't know why, but the smoothness of his face made him feel lighter, and he wondered if he'd been fitted with love's light wings. He smiled at the thought as he turned to face her.
"Sara, this is going to sound like it's coming out of left field, but just bear with me for a minute, OK?" When she nodded, he smiled gently and drew in a breath before continuing. "When I was a senior in high school, I tutored other students in math and science so that I could earn extra money for college."
She nodded, remembering how she'd done the same and trying not to extend the implications of that beyond the purely factual.
"Well, you already know I was a weird kid. Or unusual, or whatever," he added hastily. "But the word applied most often was 'weird,' so I'm going with that one. Anyway, one of my students was this girl named Sharon Palomb. Very popular, cheerleader, dating the quarterback. Pretty clichéd, now that I look back on it." He forced a grin, but she could see that there was more to the story, and her stomach twisted a bit at the pained look in his eyes.
He looked past her now, his gaze fixed on some point in the distant past as he spoke softly. "I was completely infatuated with her. Just a crush, I guess, but it felt real. So when she told me that she had broken up with her boyfriend and proceeded to ask me, this weird kid who had never even been on a date, to go to the senior prom with her…" He refocused on the present, his eyes locked on Sara's as he continued. "…well, let's just say I wasn't at my most eloquent then either, but she got the basic gist of my acceptance."
She chuckled, picturing a teenaged Grissom stammering over something as simple as the word "yes." The mental image was vivid and clear and meshed perfectly with the uncomfortable man she saw before her now. It somehow made her feel better to know that he had always been like this.
He watched her face for a moment, comforted by the sight, before he sighed and returned to the narrative. "So I bought my tux out of the tutoring money, and I'd never been so excited about anything in my life. And I went to her house and pinned the corsage on her and drove her to the prom in my mother's Buick. And, when I walked in there with this beautiful girl on my arm, I was not 'that weird kid' anymore. I was Gil Grissom, man to be envied."
Her mind raced as she mentally calculated that he would have been attending a prom sometime in the mid-1970s. She smiled sweetly, envisioning Grissom in something powder-blue and hideous, with tousled curls and a shy grin. And she could picture him with his head held high and his chest puffed out as he walked into a roomful of adolescent boys as though he were the cock of the walk. The thought was certainly amusing.
His resumed pacing drew her attention to him once more, and he ran his hand across the back of his neck roughly before he spoke again. "It was a little ironic that her boyfriend Chuck was one of those who envied me. Then again, I didn't know until we got there that the whole thing was just a ruse to make him jealous. See, I'm not really as bright as everybody seems to think," he chuckled bitterly.
Weariness seemed to overtake him then, and he dropped heavily into the recliner, leaning his head back and closing his eyes before continuing in a soft voice. "I remember Chuck practically dragging me outside when he saw us together. I thought he was going to beat me up, and I remember being scared that he would. But he just told me to stay away from his girl. I think his exact words were, 'A loser weirdo like you will never get a girl like Sharon. You'll be lucky to get any woman. They tend to stay away from freaks.'" His voice was as defeated as she'd ever heard it when he added, "Chuck was a big guy, and I was kind of scrawny back then. I got off easy."
She felt his hurt so acutely that it didn't surprise her to feel the sharp prick of tears just behind her eyes. He could just as well have avoided prefacing Chuck's harsh quotation with "I think"; it was obvious enough that he had long ago memorized the words, and they had been a part of him ever since. And hearing him downplay the impact the incident had on him, as though temporary physical pain would have been worse than a lifetime of mental anguish, drove a dagger into her heart.
She stared at him, drinking in his every feature and committing it to memory. This was huge. So huge she didn't know what to do with it. This one revelation explained so much about the man he was that she nearly crumbled under the weight of her own myriad thoughts. She watched as he repeatedly clenched and relaxed one large fist, his body fighting desperately to release some of its pent-up tension. And she knew what she had to do.
Slowly, she unfolded herself from her position on the couch and knelt beside the recliner. His eyes were still closed, and she watched him carefully as she covered his clenched fist gently with her hand. At her touch, he snapped his gaze to hers and held it for a long moment before breathing out, "Sara…"
"Shh…" she soothed, running her thumb across his knuckles until he gradually opened his hand to hers. When his palm was relaxed before her, he entwined his fingers with her own as he studied her intently. She continued to hold his gaze, willing him to understand her unconditional acceptance and the sheer depth of her feelings for him. She watched as his eyes darted over her face, seeking the answer to some unknown question. And whatever he saw there must have satisfied him, for she saw his eyes soften and felt his fingers relax a few moments later.
She offered him a tentative smile and squeezed his fingers before pulling her hand away and getting to a standing position. But the smile faded quickly when she glanced back at him and saw the abject fear on his face. And then she realized it was her leaving that had caused it. He thinks I'm rejecting him. No, Grissom. Never. "Hey," she said, reaching down to brush a hand across his hair and smiling when he closed his eyes at her touch. "I'll be right back, OK?"
She waited until he looked at her and nodded, his eyes wide and childlike, before she pulled her hand away and left the room. Her heart contracted and, in that moment, she was sure she would never see a sight more adorable than the one she had just witnessed.
Grissom's kitchen was only steps from his living room, but the breakfast bar was positioned in such a way that he wouldn't be able to see into it from his seat in the recliner. Assured of her privacy, she moved stealthily into the room and began a determined search for dishware.
To his credit, he didn't pry into her actions but merely allowed her free rein in his household. And, for some reason, that endeared him to her even more. Suddenly, nothing in her life seemed more important than this and, having completed her task, she walked triumphantly into his living room bearing two frosted mugs. She gave him a full gap-toothed smile when he looked up at her curiously, and he returned the gesture with equal enthusiasm. But, when she held out a mug to him, he stared at her in astonishment, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing as his gaze shifted back and forth between her and the glass. Finally, he blurted, "Sara, what is this?"
Feigning innocence, she nonchalantly replied, "Haven't you ever seen a root beer float?" When he gaped at her open-mouthed, she simply shrugged and said, "What? I had a craving." Her well-deserved reward was his toothy grin before he scooped up a heaping tablespoonful of root beer-flavored ice cream.
TBC…