"Good morning." Sara spoke as she walked into the suite to find him siting on the edge of the bed, seemingly steading himself against his recent dizzy spell.
She'd just been out with the kids and his mother, letting him sleep in a little bit. Something he so rarely ever did.
"How are you feeling?" She asked as she grew closer to him.
"Out to sea." He spoke, lifting his eyes to meet hers. "Which is where we should be."
"I have my meeting with Nora Cross in an hour." She took a sip of her coffee, "Any tips?" Nora had cornered Grissom yesterday afternoon in the lab.
"She likes apples. Holds her cards very close to the chest. Wouldn't even show me the methodology that Hodges supposedly used to replicate DNA in 2006."
She handed him her coffee and took the folder from him, flipping through it with her next words, "I wish I had more time in that storage unit. So we could know something about the guy behind this."
"Well, Hodges will learn more at discovery. His attorney will get to see everything they've got." He took a sip of her coffee and made a face.
"You know I take two sugars in mine." She pulled the cup back from him. "That's going to be too late. Discovery is weeks away. If we're going to figure out which one of these guys is framed Hodges we're going to have to pick up the pace."
Grissom followed her out to the living room, watching as she slung her bag over her shoulder.
"That woman is already suspicious of why we're even here." He locked his eyes to hers, handing the case file back to her.
"Have some faith." She quipped back, her voice low and rasp as she traced her fingers behind his ear. Her nails grazing his skin slowly. "You know how persuasive I can be." She pulled her fingers back and made her way to the door, leaving him to watch as she walked out of the suite.
"Could we just just jump to the fireworks?" Sara asked as she sipped her water, standing across from Nora Cross in her temporary office. "I'm here because you want to talk about cases that I signed off on where you are accusing Hodges of supposedly falsifying evidence, right?"
She took a seat now.
"Actually," Nora began, taking in the woman before her, "None of the 12 cases Hodges tampered with happened under your watch. Several under your husband's though. So, congrats. The main reason I wanted to sit with you is because nobody worked with Hodges longer than you. So, I figured you could give a good account of everything. Even the cases your husband signed off on. What you observed, what you remember."
"Well then, let me speed things up for you. I never saw anything. Hodges is a good man and he was a great lab tech. He's professional—"
"Listen." Nora cut her off, "Friendly advice. You don't want to start offering character testimony for the accused. You do that, D.A.'s got no choice but to impugn your character."
"What's wrong with my character." Sara quipped back with more confidence then she should given what Nora had sitting in the folders in front of her.
Nora opened one of the folders and began to read, "Sara Sidle's temperament can be an issue. She has blind spots. Her inability to channel emotional energy stands in the way of her becoming the best CSI should could be."
As Nora read on, Sara was confronted with a version of herself she'd nearly forgotten existed. A version of herself before she found a way to heal from her childhood, before being loved my Grissom mellowed her. When she was explosive and temperamental. Insubordinate and steadfast in her stubbornness.
"What's that from?" Sara narrowed her eyes on Nora.
"A performance review written around the time of the Chase investigation. One of the 12 cases at the center of this. By your supervisor at the time."
"Gil." She answered her own question. She could feel the blood falling away from her face at the realization of what else must be in that jacket. Her insubordination to Ecklie and Catherine, the dozen or so complaints from suspects and PD uniforms…
"That's about when you two got serious, right?"
Sara thought for a moment only to realize they'd been together for nearly a year by the time that case came in. A fact that stung all that much more.
"That has nothing to do with it." Sara defended.
"You were distracted by an affair that began in the workplace. That's why you failed to notice what Hodges was doing."
"That is completely untrue." Her voice grew sharp and agitated.
"I didn't bring this up to rile you, Sara. I just want you to know where it will go if you get on the stand and start to defend the accused."
"So if I defend Hodges, you're threatening to beat me up with my husband's own words twisted against me?"
Nora shrugged and nodded, confirming Sara's statement.
"We're going to finish this later." She stood to exit the room in a huff.
"There's more." Nora spoke up causing Sara to turn back to face her, "If Sara masters her demons, she has the potential to excel as one of the best CSI's this lab has seen. She was made for this job."
"Great." Her lips were still thin with anger, despite the additional context Nora provided.
"So?" She asked, causing Sara to spin back around once more just as she made her way to the doorframe. "How long into dating was this written?"
She sighed through her irritation, shaking her head, "A year." She turned and left before she could see the surprise wash over Nora's face.
"Can I ask you something?" Allie turned her head toward Sara as the pair worked on isolating the soil samples from the laua case.
"Mmmhmm." She spoke without taking her eyes off the dropper she was using to add the activation agent to the sample.
"It's personal." Allie amended, hesitation clear, unsure if she was treading in unprofessional territory. She continued after Sara lifted her eyes to make contact with her, encouraging her to go on, "You, uh, you and… you two started dating while working together."
"Yes…" Her voice was laced with slight irritation, carried over from her earlier meeting with Nora Cross.
"Were you ever worried? That you were jeopardizing your career. Your life's work? If it didn't work out…"
Sara softened, "You know, I didn't really consider it not working out."
"Really?"
She nodded, "I did threaten to leave Vegas several times before we got together though, in the depths of my frustration that he wasn't willing to take the chance on us. But, I just kind of knew, that once we were together, It would work out."
"How were you so sure?"
"Honestly, I don't know. Maybe I was a bit naive." She shrugged a little, "All I knew is that I wanted to be with him."
"So you never regretted it, even when you had to leave Vegas? Or when you came back without him? Through all of that, the risk was still worth it?"
Sara bit back a smile, beginning to piece together the reasoning behind Allie's interrogation. "No, I never regretted it. Even when we split up. I'm grateful we found our way back together but even if we hadn't, those years we had together before things became… complicated… they were the best years of my life. I wouldn't have traded that for anything."
"And the secrecy?"
"Was fun." She shot a knowing look Allie's way, "At least you're not trying to sleep with your supervisor. Might make it a little less complicated for you."
"What? Oh… no…" Allie tried to back track but as she did, Folsom walked past the lab and her eyes had no choice but to follow him.
"Secret wantings, they have this sort of electricity. They're often much more evident then you'd like to let on." Sara spoke through a pursed smile. A long moment passed as the two returned their attention to their respective samples before Sara added, "Sometimes the bigger risk is not going for it."
Later that evening, after the kids were put to bed, Sara let herself take a nice long hot shower. Giving herself the time to really take care of and pamper herself. She stepped out and toweled off. Drying off her freshly shaved legs. She walked out of the bathroom, making her way barefoot and naked through the suite. Surprised not to see Grissom anywhere in view. She shrugged on her robe and turned the corner to see the annexed area's double doors closed. She opened them to reveal Grissom standing there with more lab equipment then she'd thought possible.
Her face dropped at the sight. "Well this is not what I had in mind tonight." She watched as he divided samples among test tubes.
"Homework. Far from prying eyes." He spoke without lifting his gaze from his task at hand. "I borrowed some stuff from the lab."
"I bet you got some fun looks from the people downstairs in the casino while you were wheeling this stuff in." She stood next to him now, but he continued to focus on his project.
"Could you check that agarose gel?"
"You're trying to see if Hodges could have faked the chase evidence? The answer is yeah. He could have."
"So even with the technology we had back then, it was possible." He brought his attention to her first time. His eyes drifting from her face downward, noticing now that her robe was half open. That she was naked beneath it. Part of her breast exposed. The experiment began to fade away from his working memory.
"Whoever did this thought of everything. And honestly, it's starting to piss me off calling him 'whoever' all the time."
His eyes slowly drifted back upward to her face, "How'd your meeting with what's her name go?"
"Oh, she's interesting. She made it clear that we can forget about looking at that evidence."
"Well I would't share it if I was her."
"You're always so good at channeling your emotions. Maintaining a professional temperament. No blind spots. An ability to channel emotional energy."
He looked back at her with suspicion, eyes squinting and narrowing in on her, "What is it, Sara?" His voice stern.
"Detective Cross wants both of us to meet her downtown tomorrow. I'm hoping that you could keep her in suspense a little longer while I change her mind."
"How are you going to do that?"
"We're going to make a trade. She's going to give you a peak at the evidence so you can narrow down the list of suspects. But it has to be her idea."
There was a lengthy silence now, she watched as the gears in his head moved and turned, until the light of recognition washed over his features, "She read you one of the performance reports I had filed as your supervisor."
"A year into dating, Gil."
"We agreed we didn't want Catherine doing your assessments, I needed to be honest. I can't bend the process."
"Yeah well, hopefully she see's that now, too."
"You're not made about that?" He squinted his eyes more, looking into hers. Trying his best to read her.
She shook her head, "No." She shrugged, "It's not like it wasn't true." She moved her hand to the belt of her robe, loosening in a tad more. A gesture that was very much clocked by Grissom.
His left brow raised high as his eyes wandered down once more. He reached out to touch her only to realize he was still wearing his latex gloves.
"Leave them on." She winked.
A smile danced across his face as he began to follow her out of the room, abandoning the experiment. They made their way to the bed where his latex clad fingers began to roam her torso. Tracing feathery light touches up her sides and toward her breasts. Her robe hanging loosely on her body.
"Mommy?"
Sara quickly pulled her robe closed at sat up, "Warrick. What are you doing up? Did you have a bad dream?"
The young boy nodded, his head hung low as two tears worked their way down his cheeks.
Grissom snapped off his gloves and shoved them in his back pocket. "What's wrong bug?" He scooped his son up and placed him on the bed between them. He wiped the boy's tears with the back of his knuckle.
Warrick climbed into Grissom's lap and buried his head against his father's chest. Grissom's hands moved to Warrick's head, stroking his dirty blonde hair. "C'mon bud, let's go back to bed." He lifted his son and walked him back toward the other bedroom.
"Don't go too far." He nearly whispered to Sara with a wink of his own before disappearing into the other room with their son.