Sara swallowed. "They uh …. Well, my brother's friends had a crush on me, even though they were a year or two older than me. And these were his nasty friends, the ones he always got involved with when they are up to all kinds of bad shit."

Grissom could sense her stalling tactics. "If you don't feel ready ….".

"I can't go through the rest of my life not feeling ready. Hell, if I don't tell you, I'll go mad and do something else to get it out of my system." She braced herself, inhaling deeply and closing her eyes. When she opened them again, she found his blue eyes penetrating her gaze. "They fucked me. All three of them," she said in unfeeling, unemotional language. Her mouth closed again, and her eyes drifted down in their sockets.

Grissom fought the temptation to punch something. In all his years, he could only count four or five, maybe half a dozen times that he really wanted to go out and do someone a serious injury. The last time that had happened would have probably been two or three years ago. But the violation of the woman in front of him drove his anger to a point he had never known existed.

Sara looked up in time to see his jaw muscles throb, his temples pulse. There was a look in his eye, very much like the one he had when he cleared Greg's desk for the Anderson case. For a fleeting second, through all of that regurgitated pain and sorrow and emptiness, she felt a ray of delight that what had happened to her angered Grissom.

After a few seconds of intense calming exercises, Grissom found his voice. "What did your parents do when they found out?" he asked shakily.

Sara sucked in a breath. "My mom went ballistic. My dad …. Although he wasn't happy with what happened, he said it was my fault for ratting on my brother."

"What?" Grissom's eyes flashed with rage.

"Even though he said my brother shouldn't have had the weed, he looked upon what he did to me as a sort of QED moment." She patted his hand with her free one. "That's when my mom and dad got into the argument. She went crazy on him, and he hit her a couple of times, and said some things, and he hit her several more times, and that's when she got the knife." The tears threatened to erupt again, and upon seeing this, Grissom leapt up from his side of the booth and joined her, grabbing her in his arms and pressing her to his chest.

"Sara, I don't know what to say. I really, really had no idea of this. If I had, I ….".

"What, Gris? You would have accepted my invite to dinner? Let's face it, I'd rather you'd have said 'yes' because you wanted to, not out of some obligation to me." She pulled away from his slightly, wiping her eyes and sniffing. "That was a part of my life, Gil. I can't forget that it happened, just as I can't let it affect me now. I don't even know why I haven't gotten over it."

"Because you won't give yourself a chance to discuss it," he replied. "And that's my fault. I've been there for you, but never in this capacity, and that's got to change."

Sara smiled, and touched his cheek, the cheek she'd touched all that time ago.

"More chalk?"

"Huh?"

"Have I got more chalk on my face?" he asked knowingly, smiling tenderly.

Sara blushed. "I lied."

"I guessed that. Not that I mind." He turned away, and picked up his coffee cup, sipping the strong black liquid. "Is that all I need to know for now?"

Sara mimicked his actions with her mug. "As far as I know. I don't know what other demons my mom's going to pull out of the woodwork, but at least you know as much as I do about what happened."

"A true journey of discovery," he commented quietly, staring out of the window opposite the booth, taking in the serene atmosphere. He turned his attention back to Sara. "What say I take you and your mom out to dinner tonight, and we just forget about what this trip is supposed to be for."

"What, just go out and relax?"

"Yeah." His voice was so gentle, and Sara couldn't explain why that moved her. Maybe it was everything about him - the soft voice, the gentle forehead, the childish but surprisingly sexy cleft of his chin, those blue, blue eyes, so blue she felt that if she stared into them for long enough she could drown and forget about everything else.

"Sara?"

"Huh?"

"I asked you a question. Where would you like to go tonight?"

"Sorry, I was in my own little world there. Um, I think we should ask my mom,"

"Okay." He gave her hand one last squeeze, then let go.