A/N: Another chapter! Enjoy-and send us a comment!
Moving Forward
Chapter 3
Arriving home, Sara sat in her car for several moments and looked around and smiled. She had found she enjoyed working in the yard—not in the usual way of a groomed landscape, green grass, and blooming flowers—but with xeroscaping using native plants, local groundcovers, small stones and large rocks. The front of the house was minimalist; the back yard was where she had spent hours. Something bloomed nearly year round—clusters of lavender, bunches of tall grasses, bougainvillea, and rock roses had been growing for three years and with nurturing had thrived.
Leaving the car, she spent fifteen minutes walking around the yard removing unwanted weeds before she entered the house.
It did not take long for Sara to shower, wander around her home for a few minutes, and then fall into their comfortably cool bed where she slept the moment her head touched the pillow. She went to sleep happy.
When Gil Grissom pulled his vehicle alongside the one in the driveway, the sun was mid-way through the afternoon sky but at this time of year there would be several hours of daylight. His excitement of his earlier find had been reinforced when he had found two more plants with the same type of larvae. And he could hardly wait to share his excitement. Before entering the house, his hand brushed the wing of a colorful glass garden butterfly—he had lugged the thing home from his last trip and Sara had insisted it belonged at the front door. He smiled; perhaps she was right.
Inside the house, he knew Sara was sleeping—several hours, probably—based on the faint scent of her body wash. A slight fragrance of lavender lingered in their bathroom as he attempted to tip-toe while he undressed. Which meant he dropped a boot on the tile floor. And dropped a bottle while he was in the shower.
He was not surprised when she reached her arms across the bed, sliding warm hands around his neck, pulling them together in the middle of the bed. He bent his head and found her mouth with his—time flowed, washed over him until minutes became indistinguishable. Inhaling a deep breath of her—lavender lingering from her shower, the scent of her skin, the soft feel of the shirt she wore—he exhaled as an audible half growl, half sigh.
Her body was known to him better than his own; the up thrust of each breast, her smooth belly, the rise of her butt from her back, the folds and crevices between. Truly, she was made for him. He wrapped arms around her and looked down into glistening eyes; eyes that reflected the happiness in his own.
Sara's arms and legs wrapped around her husband as silky ropes. She had known for years he was made for her—and together they were a body poem—a term he had used the previous summer. When she looked up into his eyes, she saw the same love in their blueness that had warmed her; that had given her purpose for so long.
They touched, kissed, caressed, and stroked well-known places. He knew where a trail of kisses caused her to gasp; she knew what light strokes with her fingertips did to him.
Suddenly, her climax burst upon her—she gasped, her mouth dropped open in surprise—in astonished pleasure. Her hips lifted as her back arched to bring his thrusts deeper. In seconds, Grissom brought his cheek to her shoulder and gave himself over to the exhilaration of being a man. His mind reeled; for a moment he was in the sun, blinded with brightness, and then drowning in a whirling sea before rising, buoyant on a rolling tide.
For a while, they lay together, listening as each recovered their breath; Sara stroked his back slowly and felt the dampness. She kissed his shoulder to taste its saltiness.
A few more minutes passed in satisfied quietness before Grissom groaned. Reluctantly, he eased himself out of her, rolled to one side, and gathered her against him.
"I really had some exciting news to tell when I came in," he whispered, his lips against her ear.
A soft giggle came to his ears, a whisper saying, "Do tell."
Across the city:
Jim Brass seldom slept well; he would spend hours sitting alone inside his house. Sometimes he fell asleep in his chair, his head on his chest, and woke hours later feeling he had achieved victory by sleeping for four or five hours. Today, it took him longer to decide to sleep. He found himself taking inventory, mentally, of his job, his life in Vegas.
Starting with the piano he seldom played, he picked a simple melody on dusty keys before moving to bookshelves across the room. He poked through books and a box of photographs, the general detritus of bills he paid by bank draft and magazines he rarely read. When he came to Las Vegas, he had thought of the place as temporary—he would move on in a few years. But he had not and now it looked like the home of a lonely man with no hobbies or interests other than work.
The photographs kept his attention; photographs of co-workers, of Ellie, with the girl appearing to say "why must you take my picture?", one of his father in a uniform, another of his mother in a pretty print dress. Mixed in with photos were postcards from places he had never been—Sara had sent him a dozen cards from places she had traveled. Closing the box, he realized he had received more correspondence from Sara than he had ever gotten from his daughter.
Slowly, he moved to his bedroom, closed the curtains for darkness and lay down wearing his clothes.
When Brass slept in bed, he kept his holstered revolver on his nightstand. In his chair, he kept the gun equally close by, usually the second shelf of the small table where he kept the remote for his television, a glass, and his phone on top.
It was a foolish way to live, he used to tell himself, the mark of paranoid or someone who had never addressed his fears. But not lately, not in a few years—he knew people who kept a gun underneath their pillow—so his gun near him wasn't so much about fear or paranoia, but about the state of the world he lived in.
As he lay in bed, still as a stone, he tried to remember what had gone wrong—wanting to blame himself because he had been the one to leave his daughter. Yet, he knew there was no answer. Ellie had taken piano lessons and dance lessons—learned to ride horses one summer—all the trappings of what little girls wanted.
Raising an arm to cover his eyes, he thought about Sara Sidle—a child at the mercy of courts, of foster homes, of parents who stayed together until one killed the other. Too often, he had seen the results of that kind of past. He smiled; Sara had overcome tremendous odds to be the loving, smart person he loved as a daughter.
His daughter—Ellie—he had loved her since birth, but he could not like her because her lifestyle revolted him—a monster with her imperious, restless, arrogant appetites for everything degrading. She would go to prison, promises made during their long talk would be forgotten; he had no doubt that Ellie would try again to kill herself—or provoke and incite death from another.
Rolling over, he reached for a photograph that had always been at his bedside—taken on a happy day with a little girl, smiling at the camera, eyes on her dad. Who was not her dad—not her biological father—a secret he thought he had kept from Ellie until today. She had known for years. There was another photograph on the table; he reached for it, placing the one of Ellie face down. The second one was of a group, standing in a line, hugging and smiling as he had pressed the button on a new camera that had belonged to Sara.
In this picture, he saw his friends, the people who had been with him nearly every day for fifteen years, two of them for longer. His finger touched the face of one who had left them too soon, sadly remembering the events around the death of Warrick Brown. Then, he smiled at beautiful Catherine, a much younger Greg and Nick, and grinned even more at Gil and Sara. Catherine had called it their "coming out party" and it had been a joyous event.
He knew there was no turning back the clock; even if he could, where would he stop it? He felt he owed Ellie a debt and he would stand by her, visit her on days she could have visitors. He would talk with the district attorney's office, requesting she be housed in the smaller prison used for special inmates—those who had relatives in law enforcement or other connections with lawyers and judges. Ellie was not the first child of career officers of the law to end up in prison. Even with that, he doubted she would make it a year.
Sighing, he returned the photo, upright, to the table and rolled onto his back. He had plans to make, deciding in a few minutes that he would not let Ellie run or ruin his life. There was much for him to do. He punched a pillow underneath his head, unbuttoned several buttons on his shirt and closed his eyes.
In minutes, he was asleep—exhaustion played a role, but he was also working on a decision and the progress he had made pushed him into a more relaxed state than he would have thought possible a few hours earlier. He had always known the day would come, perhaps not in this way, but it was time. He rolled over, punched his pillow again, and closed his eyes.
A/N: Thank you for reading! Now, take a few seconds and leave a comment! Probably one more chapter to this one!