AN: Time to tell Shelby – hope you like it! And again, thanks for the feedback on the last chapter, every time there's a new review it makes my day a little brighter
Also, I don't know if anyone noticed, but I have changed the rating for this story – it won't be, um… relevant for a while, but I wanted to do it now anyway, so everyone knows what to expect going forward!
Disclaimer: I don't own anything relating to CSI
Chapter 9
"That took longer than I expected," Catherine notes when Sara comes into the kitchen.
"We got sidetracked for a bit," she replies, rolling her eyes when Catherine's eyebrows shoot up. "Not like you're obviously thinking. Just… talking about family."
"Well, that's no fun."
"I am very sorry my personal life isn't more satisfying for you," she apologizes, laying the sarcasm on as thick as it can go.
"You should be. I was hoping to live vicariously through you and you're giving me squat."
She has to laugh at that. "When you put it that way."
"Did you get everything ironed out though?" Catherine asks, offering a large, steaming mug of the coffee she's just brewed.
Sara lifts it to her nose and inhales the wonderful smell before taking a sip. "I think so, yeah. I'll talk to Shelby when she wakes up and, assuming she's not too overwhelmed after we get back from daycare tomorrow, he's coming over for lunch to meet her." She looks up at the other woman. "If that's OK with you, of course, this is your house."
"Are you kidding? I want front row seats for this." At Sara's narrowed eyes, Catherine rolls hers. "Kidding. I'll leave you alone if you want, but I can also be here if you think it might help or make things easier."
She considers the offer for a moment. "You're great with Shelby and she's already so comfortable with you so, yeah, if you don't mind, it would be good if you could be… around."
"She makes it easy, she's a great kid."
As if summoned by her name, Shelby appears in the doorway to the kitchen, hugging Mr. Dandelion to her chest with one hand, the other rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
"Hey, baby," Sara says with a smile. "Did you have a nice nap?"
Shelby nods as she toddles across the room and climbs into Sara's lap. She gets the little girl situated a little better and buries her nose in her soft curls, inhaling the wonderful, sleepy scent. Her daughter hasn't quite woken up yet, so they stay like that for a while, her and Catherine talking while Shelby wakes up the rest of the way.
"Can we go to the park?" she asks a few minutes later, craning her neck back to look up at Sara.
"We just came from the park before we had lunch," she reminds her.
"But that was soooo long ago."
She meets Catherine's eyes and they exchange a smile. "Not today, baby, but maybe tomorrow afternoon, OK?" She's sure Grissom will be happy to go with them if she asks.
"OK," the little girl consents with a huge sigh and Sara has to bite back a laugh.
"Why don't you go grab that new coloring book we got the other day and your crayons?" she suggests. "You never finished that pretty butterfly on the plane, remember."
Happy with the diversion, Shelby jumps down and takes off for their room.
"Do you want me to stay while you talk to her, or go?" Catherine asks when she's left the room.
"Would you stay?" Sara asks. "I have no idea what she might ask, I don't want to freeze and not be able to explain something right."
"Of course," the older woman assures her. "And relax – it's going to be fine."
On a logical level, she knows Catherine is right. Kids are resilient, they take things in stride, and even if Shelby is upset by the news, there's no doubt she'll recover quickly.
On a purely emotional level, knowing that doesn't help at all.
She waits until Shelby has settled back in her lap and opened the coloring book on the table in front of her.
"Hey, baby, do you remember when you were doing Mother's Day stuff at daycare?" she starts, the only jumping off point she's been able to think of.
Shelby's daycare had let the kids that wanted make Mother's Day cards a couple of weeks ago, and when she picked Shelby up that afternoon, she had gotten not only five different cards with butterflies in various colors, but also a sheet of paper with some talking points to discuss with her daughter based on the day's activity and what the daycare workers had called 'families of different sizes and shapes'.
"Uh-huh."
She's learned to not question Shelby's noncommittal 'uh-huhs', knowing that if she doesn't understand a question or the answer is no, she'll just say so.
"And how every family is different?"
"Yeah." Shelby nods without looking up from her coloring, most of her focus still on the butterfly that is apparently going to be yellow and red. "Tyler has two dads, Lily and Ethan and Ali have a mom and a dad, Sam has one dad, Emmie and Charlie have two moms, and me and Hallie and Noah and Ivy and Sadie have one mom."
And that's the entire group at her old daycare center.
"Exactly. But you actually have a mom and a dad."
That makes the crayon stop against the paper. "I do?"
"You do."
The crayon starts moving again, slower than before, and Shelby's quiet for a long moment. "Where?"
It's probably a logical question for a three-year-old but it makes Sara and Catherine smile at each other.
"Well, that's the thing. He actually lives here, in Las Vegas. So, I was thinking he could come over tomorrow and we could have lunch and you could get to know him. Does that sound good?"
This warrants another quiet moment, but the crayon doesn't stop moving, which she takes as a good sign.
"Can he push me on the swings in the park?" Shelby then asks with a seriousness that the question probably warrants to her, but Sara lets out a relieved breath.
"I'm sure he would if you asked."
"Then OK."
Sara looks up at Catherine, who just shrugs.
Can it really be that easy? Granted, they still have the actual meeting left, and there's no guarantee that will go as well as this did. And there might be setbacks in the future even if it does, but still. First hurdle overcome.
"Told you," Catherine says with a smile as she gets up to refill her coffee.
Sara fixes herself a big mug of hot cocoa and brings it to the couch in the living room. Shelby's asleep and Catherine just left to take Lindsey to a friend's house for a sleepover, saying that she needed to pick some stuff up from the pharmacy on the way back and would probably be gone a while, so she's about as alone and in private as she's going to get.
She takes a couple of long sips of the warm beverage before picking up her phone.
"Grissom."
"Hey."
"Hi. How'd it go?"
She has to smile at his impatience. "It went fine, like I knew it would. Actually, it was kind of… anticlimactic."
"How so?"
"Well, I had all my little explanations and speeches prepared, but all she wanted to know was if you'd push her on the swings, and when I said you would, she was just… OK."
"That's good, isn't it?" he asks hesitantly.
"It is, it's great." She sighs. "It doesn't mean there won't be some sort of… setback later, you know that, right?"
"Of course," he replies immediately. "I know there's no way to predict how she will react; this is a completely new situation for her."
"And for us," she points out, taking another sip of cocoa.
"Well, our reasoning skills are a bit more developed, so I'm not worried about us."
She knows that she's the one who started it, but hearing him refer to the two of them as a unit still puts a warm glow in her stomach.
"So how was your day?" she asks after a moment, not wanting to hang up just yet.
"Extremely unproductive," he replies with a huff. "But also very enlightening and informative."
"In what way?" she asks, pulling her legs up underneath herself and settling back more comfortably against the couch.
"I might have stumbled down the rabbit hole of children's entertainment," he admits, and she can't help but laugh.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I told you; I want to know all there is to know. We obviously didn't have time for everything, so I was… I used the power of the internet to try to figure out what she might like."
There's really no need for him to be so adorable. It's bad for her mental state.
"And what did you discover?"
"Well, let's see… Teletubbies are terrifying."
Sara snorts. "They are, right? Thank God she never got into that show."
"No?"
"At the moment, her favorites are Dora the Explorer and Winnie the Pooh," she says. "And she's been in a Horton phase lately, I swear I can recite the whole movie by heart."
"Horton?"
"Horton Hears a Who. Try saying that ten times fast."
"Ah, Doctor Seuss."
"Yeah. I actually got some sort of collected works after she watched the movie for the tenth time or something, we just finished Fox in Socks."
"She likes bedtime stories?"
The longing in his voice is so obvious she has to close her eyes for a moment. No matter what happens tomorrow, they need to work something out quickly. He needs to be a part of his daughter's life.
"A little too much," she replies after what feels like much too long. "We have a strict ten minutes per night rule, but I have to admit she's usually able to talk me into at least fifteen."
Grissom laughs over the line. "If she takes after your powers of persuasion, I have no doubt."
"Excuse me, what's that supposed to mean?"
"I think you know exactly what that means." He pauses, offering her the chance to figure it out. "New Delhi."
The name makes her snort out a laugh. "Oh my God, I haven't thought about that in years."
"Well, it wasn't your sinuses that were destroyed."
"Oh, please, it wasn't that spicy. And I did warn you."
"It really was. But yes, you did. I should have known better than to try to impress you."
The memory makes her smile.
It had been when they first met, back in ninety-eight. He lectured at UC Davis for a semester and had been roped in to do a series of seminars on different aspects of crime scene investigating for the San Francisco CSIs. She always lingered after, asking too many questions, fascinated by the subject and, which she didn't really admit to herself until much later, him. After the third seminar, she finally worked up the courage to ask if he wanted to grab some dinner, and he agreed.
He let her pick the restaurant, since she was a native, and they ended up at New Delhi by Union Square when he admitted to never having tried Indian food. He asked what she recommended, and she pointed out one of her favorites on the menu, but she told him that it was pretty spicy.
She can still pinpoint the moment he went red and desperately gulped down the entire contents of his water glass as the moment she knew she was in trouble.
It was easy, back then. They both knew that their flirty banter wouldn't lead anywhere more than, maybe, one night, which never happened. It wasn't until later, when he asked her to come to Vegas and she somehow ended up staying, that things got more complicated.
But now… it feels like they might be back there again, in the same mindset.
"I'll have you know, I've gotten much better at Indian food," he says over the line, pulling her back to the present, and she doesn't think she's imagining the hint of invitation in his voice.
"Yeah? Good to know." It's too early to go down that route, though, so she makes herself change the subject. "Tell me what you guys have been working on lately. Any interesting cases?"
Some indefinable amount of time later, she's telling him about a burglar who had tried to climb out the window of the tenth-floor apartment he'd just robbed only to get stuck, when she hears the door open and close.
"In the end, we had to call the fire department to get him down," she says as Catherine comes into the room, eyebrows raised. Grissom is laughing over the line. "And he still plead innocent! It's, like… we caught you red handed, come on."
"You still on the phone? Shouldn't Gil be getting ready for work?"
A glance at her watch tells her it's just after ten, and they've been talking for close to two hours. Catherine's voice must carry over the phone, because Grissom curses.
"Go," she tells him.
"I'm sorry, I completely lost track of time."
"It's fine, go."
"So lunch, tomorrow? What time?"
She can hear him moving around, probably getting ready to leave.
"Around one?" That should give him enough time to get some sleep after shift and they'll still have plenty of time if they end up going to the park after.
"Sounds good, and I'll call before I head out to make sure we don't need to reschedule."
"Perfect."
"OK, I really have to go, or I'll be late, talk to you tomorrow."
"Bye."
She can feel Catherine's eyes on her as she hangs up but puts the inevitable conversation off for a moment by going into the kitchen to put her mug into the dishwasher.
When she gets back to the living room, Catherine's on the couch, her own phone in her hand, and she joins her on the opposite end of the couch.
"I give it a month," Catherine says, not looking up from the phone.
"Give what a month?" Sara asks, earning an incredulous look. "Seriously, I have no idea what you're talking about."
"A month before one of you ends up jumping the other. At most. Just make sure it doesn't happen at the lab, nobody wants to see that."
She can't help the blush on her face at the words. "There will be no jumping of any kind," she assures Catherine. "Especially not at the lab."
"Yeah, I definitely wouldn't bet on that. I haven't even seen the two of you together yet but it's clear that whatever tension there was between you before you left, it's still there. If anything, it's multiplied."
Sara can't exactly argue with that, because it does feel like that to her too. Somehow minus all the awkwardness of her last few months in Vegas.
Only time will tell if it leads anywhere.