A/N:
Still in Vegas. Love and all that fluff. đź’•
I hope you enjoy the chapter! đź’›
I wrote a (surprise!) somewhat lengthy author's note, so please be aware that roughly the last third of the text of this chapter is an author's note not story text.
Fall 2015. Las Vegas, Nevada.
I woke up in the morning
To a pale light tangled in your hair
And I never wake before you
But this time I caught you sleeping there
Yes, you are my sunlight
You are my last breath of air
I would try to hold it
I would try to keep the moment
Like a photograph of the sunset
Like a little kid with a bug net
Like a dying man, I swear
You belong to me, you belong to me
If you belong to anyone then you belong to me
– Typhoon, "Artificial Light."
"Hello, darling," she said. She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful.
– Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.
Joe Bradley: You should always wear my clothes.
Princess Ann: It seems I do.
– Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) and Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn),
in Roman Holiday.
Sylvia Scarlett
Back once more in her own bed, with the man with whom she had always intended to share it, Sara slept better than she had in years. She and Grissom both slept late, given their journey the day before and the night they'd spent getting further reacquainted together in that bed.
Grissom was pleased when he awoke before Sara. The morning light was streaming through the bedroom windows, and, when finally she began to stir, he stroked her hair and greeted her with lines of poetry.
"[I] love you much (most beautiful darling) / more than anyone on the earth and i / like you better than everything in the sky / —sunlight and singing welcome your coming…."
Sara smiled at him then lifted her head to look over at the clock on the bedside table. By instinct, she groaned when she saw the time. "Oooh, sorry. I didn't mean to sleep for so long." She let her head flop back down onto the pillow.
"Why be sorry?" He reached over and ran a hand along her arm. "I've always kind of liked it when you sleep late."
Head still on the pillow, she laughed. "Trying to keep me out of the way?"
"I just…. I always hoped it meant you were less anxious, or you felt safe, or something like that…." He shook his head. "Maybe that was wishful thinking."
Sara rolled onto her side to face Grissom, then she reached over to stroke his cheek. "You're really very sweet, you know that?"
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"And I love you quite a lot." It was a bit of an understatement, but then they'd always leaned toward the understated. Sara had never had a problem with understated; it was unstated that had led them awry.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"I love you quite a lot, too." That, too, was a bit of an understatement.
"I know."
"You do?"
"Yeah." She nodded, then she leaned in to kiss him, until—
"Ooof." She groaned again, more suddenly, as Hank, showing remarkable agility for his age, jumped on the bed (and her) to announce that he, too, was ready to begin the day.
After Sara and Grissom had pulled themselves out of bed and fed Hank, the small family went for a leisurely morning walk to the nearest dog park, and the boxer finally got the chance to sniff out all the delectable scents of his new short-term home neighborhood.
When they got back to the house, first Sara then Grissom showered. Though they had just stocked up on groceries the day before, Grissom thought that, for old times' sake, he might drive over to the no-longer-new vegetarian deli near his old townhouse and pick up lunch for them; the deli had become a favorite of Sara's after their first night spent with the Lyrids, and he had already confirmed it was still in business.
Once he had emerged from the shower, toweled off, and pulled on a pair of jeans, Grissom realized Sara had kindly (and rightly) put all the t‑shirts and shirts he had brought from the Ishmael in the laundry.
After wandering out of the bedroom, he found her standing at the kitchen counter; her hair was still damp and was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and she was eating yogurt and wearing a pale blue Brooks Brothers dress shirt that was roughly three times her size. The shirt quite obviously didn't belong to her.
"Hey, could I have that shirt?" he asked.
"Huh?" Sara turned around to face him.
"Could I have that shirt?"
"This shirt?"
"Yeah."
"The shirt I'm wearing?"
"Yes."
"Right now?"
"Well, yes." It had become obvious to him she wasn't wearing anything but the shirt.
"The shirt off my back?"
"It is just a little bit too big for you, my sweet."
"Yes, but I like it." She shifted her position.
He noticed, as she shifted, that she had also neglected to button the shirt. "I'm pretty sure it's mine." He smirked at her.
"Oooh, sorry, no. I'm afraid you lost it in the divorce," she teased him. The divorce felt like the third rail of their relationship, but Sara hoped that, unlike the third rail, touching it might diminish its power. And he had, truth be told, lost the shirt in the divorce; in an effort to make things as painless as possible for her (as if anything could have rendered the divorce less excruciatingly soul-crushing), he had relinquished ownership of any of his belongings that had remained in the house.
Grissom narrowed his eyes and shot her an imploring but mildly flirty duck-faced glance. "Well, then could I perhaps borrow it from you? All mine appear to be in the laundry, and I was thinking I might go pick up lunch from the deli." He appealed to her love of the deli.
"So you want me to give you this shirt right now?" Sara flirted back, nothing mild about it. She was quite enjoying the sight of her freshly showered, still damp, shirtless (ex-)husband. She still very much appreciated his forearms, but she liked his upper arms even more. She shifted again, purposefully, and the large shirt fell even more loosely around her. She could tell her actions were not without their intended effect.
Grissom considered the implications. "Uuuh, yes. That would be helpful."
With that, Sara shrugged off the shirt then held it out to him, dangling it off her right pointer finger. "If that's what you want…."
Well, this was going to put a crimp in his plans for lunch. Although he'd once again enjoyed a very up close and personal appreciation of Sara's form over the preceding week, he still found the view quite distracting, and standing there lasciviously gawking at his now naked (ex-)wife felt a little juvenile. So far, save for one discreet, appreciative glance (well, he'd thought it was discreet—it wasn't), he'd mostly managed to keep his baby blues focused on her big brown eyes, but his self-restraint was buckling; he was going to need to act.
He whistled a few bars of "Can't Help Falling in Love" at her, and she looked surprised.
He winked as he moved toward her, and she smirked back at him in amusement.
She was still holding the shirt from her finger. He didn't care about the shirt. The shirt he tossed to the side.
Sara yelped then laughed as Grissom lifted her up. This was Vegas, after all, so the deli was almost always open; they could get dinner from the deli. For now, Grissom was going to cross "Sara in the kitchen" off his to-do list.
Sometime later, they were both still in the kitchen, naked. Sara was sitting on the kitchen floor, resting her back against the cupboards. Grissom had his head in her lap, and Sara was absentmindedly curling small sections of his hair around her pointer finger. They were laughing at themselves for acting like a couple of sex-starved teenagers. Couple? Yes. Sex-starved? Yes. Teenagers? Er, no. (Grissom's back was telling him that much.)
Still laughing, Grissom looked up at Sara. "I still can't believe you never…." Grissom knew that, unlike him, Sara could at least separate sex from love, although it wasn't exactly her preference.
"It wasn't like I'd consciously decided on a lifetime of celibacy or something. It was just that, whenever I'd consider going out to a bar or anything like that…. Well, first the whole having been framed for murdering a guy I'd drunkenly made out with thing would dampen my enthusiasm. Then I'd remember how terrible it was the last time I tried to date someone else. I mean the last person besides you I tried to date…." Sara looked around for the dog. "Well, we both know how that went." She laughed again.
"It just never seemed worthwhile," she continued. "I knew it would never amount to anything anyway. So instead…. I mean, I told myself I shouldn't think of you, but then I always did." She leaned her head back against the cupboard door and laughed some more. She still couldn't get over how foolish they'd been, each believing the other could be happy with the two of them living separate lives.
He laughed with her. It was kind of a laugh so you don't cry about all the misery and wasted time situation, but he still loved her laugh; at the best of times, which these were, it had a certain giddiness that would almost make him feel giddy, too. At an absolute minimum, being able to laugh with her again made him immensely happy. He vowed not just to make her happy, but to make her laugh more.
Eventually the laughter faded, and she went back to curling his hair with her finger. After a few minutes, she looked down at him and spoke again. "Didn't you know?"
She needed him to know it wasn't just that the other options had been so bad, so horrendously off-putting; it wasn't just that she didn't have the energy to find someone else. She didn't want him to take her comments the wrong way; she knew he could do that. If it were ever possible to interpret her words and actions of the last seventeen and a half years in a way that was somehow compatible with her not being madly in love with him, Gil Grissom would manage it. That was horseshit, of course; Sara had been madly in love with him since practically the day they'd met.
"Hmmm?"
"Didn't you know I only ever wanted you?" She was still curling his hair.
He looked up at her big brown eyes, which were gazing down at him.
"Didn't you know I could never love anyone but you?" she asked him. "Don't you know that? We could live a thousand different lives—a thousand different tales—and I would still only ever love you. I would only ever choose you. I will only ever choose you."
He wouldn't dare tell her again that he didn't deserve her, but he nevertheless remained amazed at his luck to have this woman. There was a time when part of him would still have disbelieved her, but even he couldn't misconstrue the evidence at this point.
He took her left hand in his and kissed first the inside of her wrist then her palm, then he turned her hand over. His eyes lingered momentarily over the back of her hand—over a finger where once a ring had resided, a finger that was far too naked for his liking, a finger that had in the past been more happily adorned with a band of gold of his own choosing; then he kissed her knuckle over that finger—gently, with the reverence it was due—and, finally, the back of her hand.
It was a long-foregone conclusion that Grissom would never love anyone but Sara. He had thought, for just that instant, that this should go without saying—that it should go without saying at that point that he'd only ever wanted her. But then he reminded himself that nothing between them should go without saying. Letting things go without saying was where they'd gone wrong in the past. Letting things go without saying was how they'd wound up living separate lives. So he knew he needed to say it every chance he got.
"I've only ever wanted you, Sara," he told her quietly. "I've only loved you. I'd choose you over everyone."
She smiled as she bent over him; she'd removed the ponytail elastic from her hair earlier, and her loosely curled locks now formed a curtain around his face. "I need you to know how much I love you—how much I will always love you." She kissed him lightly. "Always," she repeated for good measure, echoing their sentiments from the previous week. "I will love you always."
"Always, my most beautiful darling," he confirmed.
She straightened up then and, again, went back to her absentminded curling of his hair. A few minutes later, she spoke.
"The greenhouse!" she exclaimed. "I still cannot believe you fucked me in your father's greenhouse!" She had begun laughing again.
"Well," he said, as he looked up at her with—yes—a bit of a smirk, "it was fun."
She had started laughing quite riotously then, as, in turn, had he. She hit her head on the cupboard. "Ow," she groaned before laughing some more. She'd missed the sex, but she'd also missed the laughter. She was glad both had returned to her life; she had spent years secretly—secretly even from herself—longing for this kind of delirious happiness.
UP NEXT: NEXT CHAPTER: FALL 2015. LAS VEGAS, NEVADA.
NOTES
On having been framed for murdering a guy she'd drunkenly made out with:
I imagine Grissom would have extracted some more details on this over dinner the previous night, but I certainly didn't feel like spending time on any more details of FMN than felt absolutely necessary. I really like to keep as much distance between myself and season 13 as I can.
SOUNDTRACK LISTING
Ocie Elliott. "Stay, Love."
Ocie Elliott. "I Got You, Honey."
Typhoon. "Artificial Light."
(You can listen to these songs in my playlist for this series, which can be found by searching my username on Spotify.)
OTHER REFERENCE(S)
E. E. Cummings. "i love you much (most beautiful darling)."
A/N:
What follows is a TMI note on why I can't make any promises on when the next chapter of this story will be up; please read or don't, as pleases you. I would like to state first, though, what I also state at the bottom of this note: thank you so, so, so very much for reading; your kind support means more than I can tell you. 💛💛💛
So, I'm, ah… not very good at all this.
Two years ago now, as I was doing a "CSI as love story" rewatch and falling far, far, far down the GSR rabbit hole, I was also falling deep into ADHD burnout and overwhelming anxiety (without, at the time, realizing that I had either ADHD or a lifetime of anxiety). By the time spring 2022 rolled around, I was lacking executive functioning abilities for even basic tasks, while my mind sought solace or dopamine or whatever it was with—you guessed it—these two lovely science nerds. I read hundreds and hundreds of GSR fics, without managing to leave a single, solitary comment/review. (I wanted to comment! I couldn't! I'm not saying commenting would have killed me, but I just couldn't do it; I wouldn't have been able to continue reading if it were required, and obsessing over these two science nerds was basically all my mind could handle. So when I tell you that I get that commenting can be too much sometimes, I get it. I should also note my eternal gratitude to all the amazing GSR fic writers who—unknowingly—helped me during this time.)
I occasionally questioned whether I might try writing something about these science nerds, but I always dismissed that pretty quickly. I'd never willingly undertaken a creative writing project in my life (unless you count my last dog's Instagram). For added context, until 2022, I had last (and first, for that matter) previously read fan fiction in the mid-2000s, when my favourites on The West Wing were taking their own sweet time. So in January 2022, while desperate for more GSR content, I was like, "Is fanfic still a thing? Is there GSR fanfic?" I literally started by googling "GSR fan fiction." I'd never even heard of AO3 or FFN; I think the fic for The West Wing had been on Yahoo! Groups.
But I had all these romantic scenarios and headcanons and such constantly running through my head, and I was getting tired of having to recreate the dialogue for them every night as I fell asleep. So eventually, in late June 2022, I thought maybe I should try writing something down—at some point in the future, once I'd had more time to prepare. Naturally the next day my brain was like, no, now, now, we're doing this now. I had no conscious say in the matter. I wasn't sure whether I was going to post anything, but apparently I was going to write it.
I had a lot of fun writing out so many of my thoughts and feeling and hopes and dreams for our two lovely science nerds, and pretty soon I had a draft for this series of stories (although it was only a fraction of what I have now written). I started posting the first story in September 2022. Luckily I got to participate in a (also luckily, not very mentally taxing) overseas professional placement for several months at the end of 2022, and this was a welcome distraction from *everything else* about my life.
When I got home in winter 2023, the anxiety returned in full force. I got an ADHD diagnosis, but neither that nor the anxiety are effectively managed yet. And, truth be told, posting these stories gives me a lot of anxiety. It's sort of been a weekly cycle of posting, feeling very anxious about it for several days, talking myself back to a place of peace, getting ready to post again, posting again, rinse, repeat. Sometimes I've found myself feeling too anxious to post, and the chapter/story in question has been pushed back by a week.
So I wasn't exactly feeling great about the posting process, but I was still determined to proceed. I had a posting schedule that would have seen me finish posting this story by the end of November (last month) then post the remaining four shorter stories over the next couple months. (A few of them are synced to dates/times of year: the winter holidays and February, i.e., the anniversary of the AAFS conference.) But then, with the last chapter I posted, I was just too anxious/unhappy. This may have been because I'd slightly accelerated my posting schedule and hadn't left myself enough time to process everything; I'm not sure. But I found myself looking at Tumblr gifs of our two lovely science nerds and feeling sad and resentful, not happy, and I realized that, if I continued on as I was doing at the time, I was going to destroy both my deep love of the characters and my own happy place.
So I told myself that I didn't have to keep posting now—that, as much as I was determined to have the complete series of stories posted, I could do it in months or in a year or some other time when no one was left to read it; honestly, that thought made me feel a lot better. But then I decided maybe I didn't have to wait quite so long—that I could try posting once per month or something like that. On the upside, I tell myself, this should also leave time for me to respond to comments more promptly and to go engage with other writers' stories. (I managed to go back and read and comment on a handful of stories this summer. Commenting still gives me a lot of anxiety; at one point I felt like I almost gave myself a panic attack. But I'm going to try to work at it.) As of this morning, I have responded to all comments/reviews on these stories.
I can't promise when the next chapter will be posted. My goal is for next month, but it really depends on how I feel after posting this one and how I feel next month. I do hope you'll come back to read it, though!
If you've read this far—both in this series and in this note—thank you so very much! You certainly didn't need to know all the information in this note, but I needed to share it, if you get what I mean.
Thank you so, so, so very much for reading and for your kind kudos, comments, follows, faves, and reviews. Supportive comments/reviews always, always, always make my day. Your support for this series of stories is truly what has allowed me to get even this far in posting these stories, and I appreciate it all more than I can tell you. 💛💛💛
Whatever you may (or may not) be celebrating, I hope you have a wonderful (winter, if you're in my hemisphere) holiday season and a very happy new year! 💛💛💛 I hope to see you all back here in 2024!